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Spain trip - choosing flights

At first, I did not plan of going to Spain even though my supervisor recommended a conference event in early January 2014. However, as time flew, I realized that I could actually attend the said conference. After much consideration and budgeting, the trip could be done within RM7000. That's including the conference fees, lodging during conference days and air flight fares. That's when I started to seriously planned for the trip in April/May. Application and approval from the university were pretty smooth. But the most headache thing was purchasing the flight tickets as I needed to make sure the total cost would not exceed the budget allocated.

So, what I need was a flight flying out from KL to Spain, ideally. But at the time, there was no airline serving such route. I need to make a transit either in London, Paris, Amsterdam or any of the Middle East countries. To make life easier, I chose KL-Paris (CDG)-KL route served by MAS. Paris is the nearest to Spain, compared to Amsterdam or London. So any connection flight from there to Spain should be cheaper. Next, I need to buy a connection flight from Paris to Granada (the place of the conference). But I would also like to spend some spare days in Barcelona instead of Madrid although the latter has more connecting flights. So I bought Easyjet's Paris (CDG) - Barcelona - Paris (CDG). Finally, I added up Vueling's Barcelona - Granada. And the return trip would be by train, from Granada - Barcelona. I had all my flight purchases covered under the budget.

Now, about the flight service. Both Easyjet and Vueling are low cost carrier. The former is based in UK while the latter is a Spanish aviation company. Easyjet's service was better that Vueling. I think Vueling's serving staff lack of courtesy. But its ground staff was good. They allowed me to board the plane even though I was late (thanks to the delayed take off by Easyjet from Paris). In terms of seat comfort and in-flight meal selection, I still prefer AirAsia. And the biggest observation was - Spain was really in economy recession, just by judging the airport traffic in Barcelona. Two airport terminals but very few planes took off or landed. KLIA traffic seemed better.


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