Travel

  I am in transit right now.  I'm on the way in to a conference.  I know most of my students have no idea of the cost involved in travel.  This would be a great topic for one day.

Have the students plan a trip, figure out the cost for them to go to their dream destination, of the hotel, rental car, admissions to things, food, etc.

They could do this for one person and for their family.  The final cost could be quite shocking.

The trip from my village to the hub is $500 round trip.  From the hub to Anchorage is another $300 to $400 round trip, so about $800 to $900.  The hotel in the winter isn't too bad but if you have to calculate the trip using summer rates, it means a cheap hotel is over $100 a night.  I'm not going to talk about the upscale ones.

Everything is so much more expensive in the summer so costs about double.  The food and admissions stay the same but it can be rather expensive normally.  

A week trip for one person is probably in the $3000 range for airfare, hotel, car, food, etc.  If the family is composed of 6 to 9 people, that makes the cost jump. 

For me, I can fly 2 people in August from Fairbanks to Los Angles for under $1400 round trip which is just a bit more than here to Anchorage.

If students choose to look at the costs at different times of the year to see how much seasonal changes affect the costs.  It would be easy to create an excel spreadsheet with the costs so they could create graphs to compare the different costs.

Yeah, a great real life problem.  I've got to go catch my flight.  Have a good day.