In Pursuit of Plane Tickets – Part Two – Yerevan

There are just two flights a week between Yerevan and Aleppo. This doesn’t allow as much flexibility as you might think, as the flights are on Sunday and Monday. For some inscrutable reason the Sunday flight is slightly cheaper. The flights are listed separately by Syrian Air and Armavia, but are clearly code-shares.

Perhaps not surprisingly, none of the big internet sites like travelocity.com, nor the consolidators (see hasbrouck.org/faq/index.html for loads of info on consolidators), had a good deal on this flight. In fact, Syrian Air had the cheapest price, and I would have bought my ticket from them, except that when I read their fine print it seemed that I needed to have an actual paper ticket issued. As there’s no Syrian Air office in the US, I couldn’t do that in the time frame allowed.

So I paid the extra to buy from onetravel.com, an outfit I’d used successfully before. But then I ran into another problem – since the flight began outside the US, they wanted me to fax them a copy of my ID plus both sides of my credit card, and I didn’t have a fax machine.

A friend kindly sent the fax for me, but I started thinking it was time to upgrade my computer set up. Then a few days later my seriously aged printer stopped communicating with my much-newer desktop, and that convinced me to go buy a new one. I now have an HP Officejet 6500, which takes up more space on my desk, but scans, copies, and faxes as well as prints – and which I used to scan in the old photos on the last post. Now I wonder whether to count the cost of the printer as a travel cost….