Two flights are better than one

I had a call from Presentable TV last night about the Late Night Poker tourney. Turns out that both the semi-final and final take place on Sunday 24th July, so if I finish 1st or 2nd in my heat I'll have another game to play that stops me making our flight to Vegas.

Have been watching a few flight options for the 25th and decided I needed to take the plunge. The £408 option with AA is no longer available, and the next price band up involved a 6 hour wait in Chicago. The BMI flight via Washington was £435 last night but £453 this morning so I started to panic and ran into town to talk to some travel agents.

My thinking was that these guys would know what the feasible options were - for instance, was there a reasonably priced ticket that I could cancel if I didn't need it, or how long it is possible to hold a flight without booking it. Turns out they weren't actually so great. In Co-op Travel they couldn't find me any flights at all for the 25th and Thomas Cook's best effort was on the 26th for £670, even before trying to get a flexible ticket.

So I bit the bullet and booked myself on the BMI flight on Monday 25th, just in case. It's five hundred quid I may not have needed to spend, but on the other hand if someone had offered me the chance to go on Late Night Poker for that price, I'd have jumped at it!