Travel Costs

I've found that when I'm looking at ticket prices to travel somewhere I tend to evaluate the cost of the ticket based on factors such as the cost of other modes of transportation, ticket prices at other times of the year, ticket prices to other destinations... But rarely try to evaluate how much the trip is actually worth to me.

Say that it costs $1000 to fly home for thanksgiving. Sounds outrageous since say it is usually $400 around thanksgiving time and $250 other times of the year. But what if you are asked what is it worth to you to get home for thanksgiving? Or why does spending $1000 to go to Egypt seem reasonable, but $2000 seem unreasonable? Do I actually know the value I would get from a trip to Egypt to within $1000? Is the purchase of travel tickets purely based on a game of trying not to be the chump?

Priceline sort of gets at this, although it always shows you the normal prices before you have to name your own. I bet if it didn't do that it would be incredibly difficult to decide what to pay and in the end the decision would probably mostly rely on a guess of what prices should be.

Maybe that's more universal than just airline flights, but I do think that when I buy items there's typically a question of how much is this worth to me, rather than just, how's this compare in price to similar (but not equivalent) items. (The "not equivalent" is important, because unlike say a different smart phone, I can't buy last year's ticket home instead of this year's and a ticket to someone else's home wouldn't make sense, but still factors into the acceptable price calculation).