British Airways Sale on STA

Were we ever pleased to see a sale on British Airways from student travel agency STA on now -- we're getting ready to buy a ticket to Barcelona, Spain, for our intern, Brooks, who's never been overseas, and we tried to tell him just the other day how nice it would be if we could find him a cheap ticket on a non-US airline. Maybe it's just our experience, but sitting for five-eight hours on a plane staffed by grouchy attendants while paying too much for terrible food is so unappealing that paying a bit more to fly on, say, Virgin or British Airways instead would be worth it.

(On our last Denver-NYC flight [three hours in the air, one hour stuck on the runway in NYC], the United flight attendant actually told us, as she raced past with the food cart, that we could find out what she was selling to eat in the inflight magazine. Someone seated behind us loaned us a copy of the magazine and we thumbed frantically, but she was long gone, never to be seen again. This type of hurried and sometimes downright rude thing has become the norm on our US airline flights over the last couple of years. Compare to Qantas, where a friendly flight attendant cruised casually by with amenities fairly frequently during our fourteen hours to Australia, or Virgin, where we got pretty good food (including chocolate!) quite often from very friendly folks over five hours from London-NYC last year.)

But we digress. Our point is that STA is offering a nice sale on British Airways (buy through February 21) for tix starting at $252, with a free stopover in London. Perfect for Brooks, who can take the tube straight from Heathrow to the hostel-heavy West End, hang for a week or so and see the London sights, and then an easy tube ride back to the BA terminal, where he'll hop the plane to Barcelona.

See, we have been debating for a while now whether he should fly to London, find his way to London's Stansted airport where he could get a cheap European airfare, like from Ryanair, to Spain to save some money (cheap European airlines, though, can be a big hassle for first time travelers -- luggage restrictions, out of the way airports...), and if he was already gonna get off the plane in London -- well, perhaps he should spend some time in London... and so on. Our questions: would the hassle factor in a cheap European airfare be worth getting a week in London on the way to Barcelona, and worth the savings for a first-time overseas traveler unused to hassle?

Cost of an NYC-Barcelona ticket on the current sale with a stopover in London: $636 roundtrip. Compare that to a "normal" adult fare -- $632 NYC-London plus $207 London (Heathrow)-Barcelona -- savings of $203. Cost to do the Ryanair from Stansted airport to Barcelona thing is $532 -- $476 NYC-London on the sale plus $59.22 London (Stanstedt)-Barcelona -- savings of $100 over the STA sale fare with the free London stopover. So -- staying on British Airways all the way to Barcelona with a London stopover, we'd spend $100 to avoid the difficulty factor for a first time traveler of figuring out the various hassles of flying cheap European airlines but also getting a stopover in London.

Ultimately, we win either way because Brooks will be flying British Airways from the US to London -- the rest will all be good, one way or the other.

Check it out for yourself, along with other student airfare sales going on this week:

• Current Student Airfare Deals (including the British Airways deal)

_{Related: Student Airfare Finders | Cheap Airfares in Europe}