Tip when booking your flights to the Desktop Summit

If you can't find the Gran Canaria airport in the autocompletion field for your tour operator, airline or flight search site of choice, try with Las Palmas or LPA.

On a side note that I don't know whether if helps or makes things even more confusing:

• Gran Canaria: name of the island
  
• Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: name of the city
• Las Palmas: name of the province, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura are the islands that belongs to tha province.

To make it a little more confusing, people usually refer to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, as just "Las Palmas" which has ended up to be the most common way to refer to the city as most times people don't talk about the province.

Yes, we like to mess things up with names, that's what you get when you are a fragmented piece of land :-)

Comments

[Simos]

So, if someone finds a cheap flight to one of the other islands, would it make sense to book it?

How good/cheap/fast is transportation between islands?

[Alberto Ruiz]

@Simos:

You can get a one way flight from one island to another for around 50 euros and it's usually a 30 minutes flight + boarding time.

The companies flying between islands are Binter and Islas Airways.

Have you found a flight to another island that suits you better? Which island/airport?

[Simos]

There are chartered flights from Europe to individual destinations in the Canary Islands. Normally, one gets a package tour which includes the flight, or there is an option for flight-only, when seats happen to be available in the plane.

For my travel plan at the moment it does not help to book such a chartered flight, however someone else might find it useful.

For example, someone might book such a 2-week package tour to Fuerteventura/Lanzarote and plan to visit Las Palmas for GUADEC in between. Or book just the flight.
For sample prices, see
http://book.flythomascook.com/skylights/cgi-bin/skylights.cgi?module=CP&page=FLIGHTS_LAS_PALMAS

[Carlos]

Don't forget about people confusing Las Palmas with Palma (de Mayorca) or Palma (another of the Canary Islands). I've even had to explain the difference to Spaniards.

[Alberto Ruiz]

@Carlos:

Actually, it's Palma (de Mallorca) and _La_ Palma... Jeez... it really is a mess.