Taking The Gamble: The ‘March in America’ Airline Tickets Bought

At some point, you always need to make a decision. My March trip to America is currently giving me lots of decisions one after the other. The plan (as you may recall) is to attend four Tech/IT conferences (BarCampLA, ETech, SXSW and Mix06) between March 2nd and March 23rd. As well as being at these conferences for my own information, research and contact building, I’ll also cover them for The Podcast Network’s Tech Confernece show, much like I covered the Edinburgh Fringe, although I’m looking at 40 shows, which is twice as many as the Fringe, in the same time period.

Now to manage all this, lots of things need to be in place, not least some sponsorship, and the requisite passes to cover these conferences as ‘media.’ As of right now, I can’t hand on heart say I have all of the major elements ready. Most of them, yes, and I’m fairly sure some things will fall into place in the next two weeks, but…

…the prices for my Transatlantic flights are starting to climb up. Having watched American Airlines pricing for many years, there is a point where they dip down and stay satble stable and low for about a week, and then climb up again. This sweet spot for booking flights came to an end on Saturday. I spotted this on Friday night, and realised that a decison about going to America, and more importantly, the return flight home, had been reached. Time for a go/no go call.

Well, I’m going. I’ll be arriving in Los Angeles late on Thursday March 2nd, and flying home from Las Vegas on the morning of the 23rd. IN between still needs some planning and I’m still unclear on where I want to / need to be between the 15th and the 20th, but that’s for a few weeks time. Right now, I’ve just snapped up some of the last £274 tickets to go Edinburgh to the West Coast USA and back to Edinburgh.