If you want to compare offers for a travel project, you should consider not only the price tag of the air ticket, but also the hidden costs of your flight. This article gives you a checklist of the most common outlays on top of the air ticket price. If you have a good travel agent, he will discuss these hidden costs with you. But if you use the booking engines in the internet, you may get a cheap air ticket, but miss out on the hidden costs of your flight

Hidden expenses may be associated with

1. Luggage
2. Change or cancellation penalty
3. Expenses to reach the airport
4. Expenses for a hotel room needed because of early starting or late arriving flights
5. The cost of your time you spend on the road.

On top of these common expenses, some airlines charge you a fee for a credit card payment or a seat reservation. Mostly a fee for issuing the ticket is charged. This may or may not be included in the price tag of your air ticket. If you do not consider the hidden costs of your flight carefully, you may pay at the end of the day much more for your journey than necessary.

Leisure travelers often underestimate the value of their time, because they are not paid for their time, and family members drop them at the airport and pick them up again, without charging for time. But your time, and the time of your friends is still a valuable resource. Many successful people put even a higher value on time with their family time, than on time spent with customers or clients.
If you want to get the most for your resources spent on travel, you really need to acknowledge the value of time as part of the hidden costs of your flight. Otherwise you could end up believing that you save, while you are wasting your resources.

I am well aware that it can be a daunting task to calculate total costs of a flight, including the hidden ones. For this reason I included into the free membership area of http://www.MaxValue4Airfare.com a small script, that acts as a checklist for resources used to travel. While you fill the flight information into the form, it does the math in the background, adding the tickets price and the hidden costs of your flight. This way you get easily a meaningful price tag which is useful to compare your flight offers.

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