Japanese vending machine sells flights to surprise destinations

[boingboing]

Originally published at: Japanese vending machine sells flights to surprise destinations | Boing Boing

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[Papasan]

I’m brave, but not that brave.

[Rusty_Brooks]

I don’t get it. You get $9 off the cost of a flight to a random destination? (You pay $44, you get $53 in points, must be used to buy a ticket to the designated place)

[mallyboon]

If you are incredibly indecisive or just out of ideas, but need a weekend away, it could be just the ticket. Sometimes you need to make your own fun, but it helps having a seed. Though it might suck if your ticket just took you from Narita to Haneda.

[atl]

I wish there was some travel application that would let you tag on a random destination en route to your main destination for a 36-48 hour stop over. That is, let’s say I want to go to London – but if it were somehow cheaper to route me through Lisbon for a day, I’d totally dig on it. I don’t want to plan the bonus city, but it might be a reason to visit a city you might otherwise not get to.

[ClutchLinkey]

Iceland does that. Last time I flew from east coast USA to germany, we went via Iceland and spent three days there for no extra flight fee. It was lovely.

[Bernel]

[Jesse13927]

Japan Airlines has a thing where, for 6,000 miles (domestic round-trip reward tickets are usually 12~15,000), you can fly round-trip to a mystery destination somewhere in Japan. Before you make the booking, they show you four possible destinations, so you can back out if none of the places interests you. The idea is to get people to discover places that they would otherwise not even think to visit.

One of Japan’s largest travel agencies, HIS, used to offer mystery tours where, for a surprisingly low price, you could book an all-inclusive package trip to somewhere in Asia. You didn’t find out where you were going until a couple of days before (it worked with last-minute cancellations). They don’t offer it any more, and it was only available for Japanese nationals (I asked why once, and they said it was because they couldn’t accommodate visas), but I always thought it was an awesome idea.