Hi, I'm surprised to be able to attend after being certain I had a scheduling conflict, but I am. Unfortunately, investigating fares from NYC to Banja Luka in late July that are still available in mid-May is making me even more surprised about how expensive the trip is. Although I might ask for a bit of travel sponsorship, that doesn't scale well to everyone traveling from the US (or nearby parts of the Americas), and if I can find a way to reduce the cost by the amount of travel sponsorship I'd request, then those funds can go to peope who need it more.
To that end, I'm wondering if I could get enough people interested in making a group booking from NYC [either EWR or JFK] on Saturday July 23rd <-> Zurich [ZRH] on Sunday July 24th, using one of the two Star Alliance flights arriving at 7:55am or 8:40am, and returning from Zurich at 1:00pm on the afternoon of Sunday July 31st. The other leg of the booking would be on B&H Airlines directly between Zurich and Banja Luka on the 24th and the 31st, with 1h55m or more of scheduled connection time in each direction at the Zurich airport. This would also remove the need to travel from Zagreb one of the other cities being discussed, bypassing the ground transportation confusion completely. Without any group discount, at published fares, this would cost $1700-2000+ even in economy class, based on my searching, or $1500+ if I want to accept an earlier departure time and an extra 1h10m layover in Amsterdam to save a couple hundred USD via Delta. For what it's worth, going via Zagreb or Ljubljana didn't seem to be reliably cheaper or faster from people starting in the US. If I can assemble a total group of at least 10 people who want to try this plan, I'm willing to contact some travel agents to see if they can get a better fare for us. More people will make this more likely to work; I've never done this kind of attempt before so I don't know the thresholds which apply. Does this sound appealing? Assuming at least 2 or 3 people say yes, I'll add it to the wiki tomorrow and reply to this thread with an URL to add yourself to. See you in July, I hope! - Jimmy Kaplowitz ji...@debian.org _______________________________________________ Debconf-discuss mailing list Debconf-discuss@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-discuss
