I think transparency is a good thing, so I'm going to be very thorough in recording our real costs so others who want to travel to AGDQ can get an idea of what kind of expenses to expect. After doing tons of cheap airfare searching on everything from Kayak to Expedia to Southwest's page I found the best prices by going with Southwest Airlines and buying on a Tuesday (today). It was tricky to deduce this - for instance, Frontier shows a lower flight cost but has extremely high baggage fees that wipe out any actual savings ($25 for the first carry-on and $20 for the first checked bag; we'll need at least one extra bag for TASBot and other hardware which added up to the same or more than Southwest's prices). Also, many of the flights that Kayak offered would have required staying an extra day at the hotel to get the better prices which offset any benefit.
Taking into account just getting myself from OAK to IAD and back my round-trip costs were $615.80. Southwest calculated this as $157.10 from OAK to DEN and $268.10 from DEN to IAD, arriving on Saturday, January 3rd at 10:50 PM EST with a January 11th return flight for $168.10 from IAD to DEN and $22.50 from DEN to OAK (with the last segment being extremely cheap due to taking advantage of their "ripe for the picking" sale). My wife's travel costs were nearly identical but we weren't able to take advantage of the sale price so her return flight from DEN to OAK was $136.10 meaning her fare was $728.70, bringing our total AGDQ related airfare costs to $1,343.80 (with the most expensive segment by far being January 3rd from DEN to IAD at a cost of $536.20 alone).
It's always possible that our airfare could have been cheaper had I waited, but this is risky because we're traveling around the time of a major holiday. The
general advice is to purchase tickets 54 days in advance but to error on the side of buying too early rather than too late which is more or less the case here. Inevitably, a cheaper option will show up in the next few weeks and we'll be kicking ourselves, but it'd be an interesting experiment to price out the same flights the day before we travel and see exactly how expensive it would turn out to be. :)
Moving on, the
hotel cost will be $800 + a 12% tax of $96. The conference fees are still in flux but $100 is probably a good guess for two people. Other costs for food and tolls will probably be around $200 again. That comes up to a total of $2,539 meaning I was off by ~$400 or so. Part of the reason for this is when I was doing my initial math I was only counting the cost of getting from Denver to Washington (because we drove to Colorado), but it turns out that driving from California to Colorado was actually pretty darned expensive, not to mention time consuming. The numbers tell an interesting story - our Denver to Washington costs for airfare last year were $899.60 while the same legs this year add up to $872.40 meaning we actually got a better deal this time around.
So, all that to say I'm looking at a shortfall of $400 but I'm also totally willing to take that on myself. I'll gladly accept any donations that come in but it's my fault I'm short-sighted on not accounting for the higher airfare. :) I now have the airfare out of the way and the tickets purchased so I can focus on actual marathon prep work - thanks for those who have shown an interest and please let me know if you have questions about how I did the math on all of this. Thanks!
