The email landed at 6:40 on a Tuesday morning in early February, while I was still in bed in my second-year flat with the radiator clicking and a seminar on econometrics I had not prepared for. I had booked a week at an ashram outside Rishikesh for the end of June, paying £340 for the room and all meals, and the confirmation cheerfully informed me that the retreat began on the 21st. International Day of Yoga. The one week of the entire year when every yoga school in northern India, and a good many in Bali and Portugal too, charges whatever it likes.
Had I checked the date when I booked, I would have gone a fortnight later and saved perhaps £90 on the room alone. What I did not yet realise was that the room was the smaller half of the problem.
The flights were the expensive part
Term ended on the 13th, which meant I had eight days to get from Manchester to Delhi at the start of the Indian monsoon, and no ability whatsoever to shift the dates. Fixed dates are the whole difficulty for anyone flying on a student calendar, because the fare finder can only find you a cheap day if you are willing to travel on one. A friend at the same university told me she once paid £412 return to Delhi in late June; I paid £688, and considered myself fortunate, since the equivalent seats a week before departure were hovering around £950.
Prices for that corridor do not soften until the second week of July, once the retreat crowd has dispersed and the monsoon has properly set in, which is fine if you like rain and terrible if you have already paid a deposit. Booking in February for a June departure is roughly the right window for long-haul, though I would not push it past mid-March for a date as loaded as the 21st. One thing I have stopped doing is buying on a particular weekday in the belief that it matters. It does not. Midweek departures often cost less because fewer people fly then, but the day you purchase on has no effect on the price.
Rishikesh itself was worth it, and I would say that even having spent the first two days horizontal with a stomach bug and a fan that did not work. The teacher, a woman in her sixties who had been running the place since before I was born, took one look at my sunburned forearms and told me to sit at the back. Fair enough.
- The retreat’s cancellation policy, read properly, not skimmed
- Whether the quoted price includes meals, or just the room
- The airport transfer, which is almost never included and rarely cheap
- Whether the school expects a deposit in rupees or in sterling
- Your term dates, confirmed in writing, before you pay anything
What actually decides it
Anyone flying to a yoga retreat from Europe should at least price the alternatives, and for some of these trips they win. A retreat in Portugal or southern Spain can be reached by train, and a friend who went to a place near Granada last September spent €180 on rail fares against the €260 she would have paid to fly with a bag. For India, though, the train is not a serious option, and I would not pretend otherwise. If your retreat sits on the same continent as you, the ground route deserves an honest look.
The one that catches people out is Sri Lanka, where I spent a fortnight with my sister the summer before last. Most of the flights run through Dubai, and the fare swings wildly depending on how far ahead you commit, which is exactly the sort of thing Kupi.com’s Dubai – Colombo flight comparison is built to show you at a glance. I checked it out of curiosity in April, found a fare £140 below what I had paid, and made a small unhappy noise into my coffee.
See also: What a Cold Plunge Really Costs, From Unit to Install, for Daily Use
A note on the bag
One carry-on, and I mean it. Every low-cost leg I have taken in the last three years has charged me more for a checked bag than for the seat, and a yoga mat strapped to the outside of a rucksack has never once been weighed by anyone. My mat travelled to Rishikesh and back for nothing.
What decides the whole thing, in the end, is not the retreat fee and not the fare, but whether your dates are genuinely fixed. Mine are, three times a year, and that is worth more than any booking trick I know.
