We celebrate our boy's first birthday in Indian calendar with a traditional Indian function in India and invite friends and family. His birthday is in August this year. Since we just moved to the UK, it is not feasible to take vacation right away. So we cut some slack and are celebrating it in November (as weird as it may sound, this is not unusual). We picked that month because the tickets should be cheaper and Deepavali (the biggest and grandest Indian festival) falls in the same month too. So we can celebrate his birthday and Deepavali in a single trip.
We have been looking for tickets to India for a week now. I finally booked it today in Oman Air. The travel involves a stopover in Muscat. British Airways is the only airlines which flies to Chennai direct from Heathrow. It costs £150 more in total, but they did not have flights for the days we wanted to fly. Also who knows what will happen to BA and their strikes in November. So we decided to play it safe and went with Oman. It costs £780 (about $1200) for the three of us, a great deal since we spent at least $1200 per ticket when we lived in US. The journey would be 12 hours for the onward flight and 17 hours for the return flight, about 8 hours shorter than if we had flown from US.
I noticed that for the last two or three trips to India, we have been booking the tickets through the Internet (either through a travel website or the airlines directly), without using a travel agent. Every time we call travel agents and get a quote, but we book it ourselves. The tickets are either the same price or a little cheaper this way. Also, we find a lot of options and sort through them easily in the Internet. Anybody out there still using travel agents? If so, do you find it better?
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