Shopping for Game Tickets, Hotels, and Flights

This quest is about going to every stadium and seeing each games in each city. In order to do that I need to plan how to accomplish it. For me, the planning of the trip is almost as much fun as the trip itself. The first thing I had to do was find three (or more) teams playing home games near each other the same weekend. By doing the trips with at least three cities, I can do the quest at a reasonable pace and save money by minimizing flights and hotel nights. By grouping cities together (e.g. Washington and Baltimore or San Francisco and Oakland), I was limiting the weekends I could do the trips. So the first fun thing to do was to figure out where to go and when.

If only it were that easy. Some cities have reasonably priced flights, while others don't. That's why I still haven't figured out how to go to Toronto and Pittsburgh. Well, I could've grouped them with Detroit and Cleveland, but I ended up going to those cities along with Chicago, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati around Labor Day weekend. Unfortunately, you can't always find home games for all the teams near each other. So I only got those five. I was able to find reasonably priced flights to everywhere else and/or use miles for the trips. The 50,000 Delta miles American Express gave me when I got the card last year have given me $500 off flights.

Shopping for flights wasn't as simple as just buying them. I waited until there were fare sales before buying the flights. So there was strategy and that's a blast. Next came hotels. It wasn't as simple as choosing any hotel in a city I was going to. Where did I want to be? Near the airport? Stadium? A subway line? How would I get to the hotel from the airport? Could I book at a Hilton hotel and earn points? I did find out that if you booked your Hilton stay on Orbitz, you don't earn points. I wasn't as concerned about hotel amenities, although an airport shuttle might save me $40 getting to and from the airport. I never went to Priceline or any site where I was choosing a hotel blind. Getting the right hotel in the right location was more important than saving $20 on the price. Hotel room prices aren't as fluid as airfares, but they sometimes do change.

Game tickets were perhaps the most strategic and thus the most fun. First, I had to figure out where I wanted to sit. Like hotels, this wasn't simply "what's the least expensive?" No, my first question was what's acceptable and what's not? Or is that two questions? Last season I settled for tickets where I didn't want to sit because the tickets I wanted were too expensive. That was a mistake. Why go if I wasn't going to really enjoy myself? After that I was determined to sit on the lower level between the bases. Once I determined where I'd sit, I needed to look on Stubhub.com to see what the prices of the tickets were. Were there good deals to be had? What was a good deal anyway? Well, if you watch Stubhub for a week or two, you can see what a good deal is. Sometimes people will put up tickets inexpensively either because they don't check out other prices or maybe they really want to sell them fast.

One thing I learned this season was that if tickets are priced too good to be true, jump on the deal immediately. Other people are watching Stubhub too and the tickets won't last long. There was a day two weeks ago where three pairs of lower level tickets to a Red Sox at Astros priced between $65 and $70. I was waiting to hear back from a potential traveling companion and didn't jump on them. I thought I'd have some time. About 12 hours after I first saw them, those tickets were all gone. The prices were at least $120. Lesson learned. So when a Club seat ticket for the game was posted at $95.50, I bought it. There is currently only one Club seat listing for under $150 on the website now and those tickets are $123 per ticket. And that's for two seats. If I only want one, the cost is $167. So I check back to the website a few times a day. Sure, that's a little obsessive, but I think it's fun.

I'd always assumed that the prices on Stubhub were lower than what the teams were selling them for, but that isn't always the case. Fortunately, Stubhub has a button where you can compare the prices. I found two games where the teams were selling the tickets for less. Go figure.

I'm sure you can have someone else buy all this for you or you can just choose something and be done with it. For me though, the planning has been a blast.