Take Off With Tauck airfare promotion for 2024
The airfare promotion is back again but good luck with it. It only applies to newly booked tours to Europe (land, river, small ship) departing by 31 Aug.
https://www.tauck.com/guest-travel/towt-2024
Economy air - $990 per person
Premium Economy air - $1790 per person
Business air - $3890 per person
But, as it says in the offer, "some restrictions apply". Well I found out the hard way at least one restriction is that for all classes of seating, there is a max threshold Tauck won't go over. In spite of two different agents trying to find flights, changing to different tour dates, adding pre/post night stays, etc there were no flights Tauck could offer under this deal for either Premium or Business. I don't live near a major hub so basically the offer is similar to Viking and other tour companies that make offers only from major hubs.
If the offer is useful to you, I wish you the best. Bon Voyage.
Comments
It might be possible to take advantage of Tauck's 'deal' by booking and paying for separate r/t feeder flights between your local airport and a major gateway. Not sure how much you could save, if anything all, however. A number of us do that on a regular basis anyway but there are disadvantages- separate PNRs, separate airlines, etc. and the likely need to retrieve and recheck bags at the gateway.
Also, to get the best price on business class airfares, many of us book at the start of the booking window (330 days prior to flights for many airlines) so would have already purchased tickets for a 31 Aug tour.
Ditto what Alan says. When you live in a minor hub (Tucson for me) you get to become a pseudo travel agent learning the ways to get the best ‘bargain’ in air fares, even if it means accepting a bit more risk or inconvenience.
Ditto - I live in Orlando and mostly fly with Delta which means internationally I always have to go to Atlanta, New York or Detroit as we are not a Delta hub.
Yes, the "get to the hub yourself" option was proposed by the agent. But at that point after a week of dealing with it, multiple phone conversations I decided it wasn't meant to be. Will likely reschedule for 2025 when we have a wider pick of dates and can search for fares when the booking window opens as Alan said. That's what we normally do. Interestingly she even talked about maybe she could get us gift of time but the hotel.rate there was so.low it wasn't a bug benefit.
For some this offer might work out well.
We have to play around with airfares as well to beat some of the prohibitive high fares with connections! The Tauck fares don’t normally help as we are not near a hub either. When we go to our Danube cruise end of May, I just booked a business r/t to Paris, then purchased a separate hop from Paris to Budapest, then Prague to Paris. It is a bit of a pain to retrieve luggage on the way home to check back in, but we saved thousands…..so we will do it! Plus we get to stay in Paris a couple of days ahead of our cruise. Always a good idea.