Cheap and Slow or Expensive and Fast?
April 26th, 2008, 2 Comments »
As regular readers know, I do a fair bit of travel, both for business and leisure. I spend a lot of time en route–on planes, in trains and in automobiles (mostly taxis and airport shuttles).
In my experience, when I want to get from Point A to Point B, there’s usually at least two ways. There’s the cheap, slow way, or the more expensive, faster method. And you know what? The expensive route is almost always about 2.5 to 3 times as expensive as the cheap route. Consider some examples:
| Cheap and Slow | Expensive and Fast | ||
| Ferry & bus from Vancouver to Victoria |
$40 | $120 | Seaplane from Vancouver to Victoria |
| Airporter to Victoria Airport from home | $16 | $40 | Taxi to Victoria Airport from home |
| Ferry plus bus to Tofino from Vancouver | $60 | $188 | Seaplane to Tofino from Vancouver |
That’s hardly a large data set, and I’m no economist, but it’s a pattern I see over and over again. I remember similar ratios around renting a car or hiring a driver in Morocco, or flying versus the ferry among the Greek isles.