I Am Looking for Discount Airline Tickets

I am looking for discount airline tickets is a question I get asked a lot. I have used cheaptickets.com in the past. cheap tickets or any other similar source is a good place to look because they buy tickets in bulk for resale. When you buy tickets from a source like this, be aware of every little detail. For instance if you purposely bring only carry-on luggage, make sure that your discounted tickets have not landed you on a connecting commuter flight that defeats the purpose of a carry-on by requiring they go below deck (because of the small jet size).

Airline ticket prices fluctuate constantly based on supply and demand. You get the feeling it’s like the stock market. Buy far ahead of time and during periods when others are not likely to be competing for seats. Seats on a particular flight will drop in price due to poor sales, then quickly rise when the buying starts again. You’re particularly subject to these fluctuations when you buy direct from the airline.

There is an IE add-on called SideStep.com that searches multiple airline and travel databases simultaneously. I have not used it personally so I am not aware of its reputation, nor if it comes with malware.

Both Kayak and Sidestep (which can be used with firefox) are great. They are not resellers themselves but direct you towards the cheapest airfare.

The interface on Kayak.com is especially nice– you can select which airports, flight time, and it shows you how the price fluctuates to help you better deduce which concessions are worth it. I always check a few sites before purchasing and found that I can assure myself a good price by purchasing about 4 weeks in advance of my flight. If you purhcase too early, fares are often much higher.

Air fare prices do fluctuate, so keeping an eye on the price is important. But that also takes time, which is why I think TripStalker is great. It’s a downloadable application (Windows only) that continuously searches for the best price on airfares (and hotels & cars rentals). You can be notified via email or desktop popup when a price drop occurs; the service is particularly great for those obligation trips (Weddings, reunions, etc.) because you know you have to go, and you know when you have to go and you know you want to save money getting there!

1. Find the flights you want on Orbitz/Travelocity/etc and then search for those exact flights on the airline’s own page. American Airlines has a low price guarantee, for example. I found the airlines themselves to have slightly cheaper airfare prices.

2. Believe it or not, sometimes you can get cheaper flights by buying two one-ways separately, one of them from Southwest or JetBlue. (Especially true for multi-city flights.)

3. Flexibility with multiple airports helps when you are looking for discount airline tickets. My cheapest airfare for a multi-city flight arrives and departs from different airports in all three cities. I’ll just have to keep my travel documents with me to remember which is which!

There are many specialty travel agencies that have access to special fares for specific travel purposes, especially when traveling internationally. These include student travel, humanitarian aid travel, mission travel, group travel, and others. MTSTravel.com, for instance, specializes in international travel for not-for-profit organizations, humanitarian aid travel and missions travel.

Aside from the online sites (I haven’t seen onetravel.com mentioned yet, so there it is, check out their Travel Advisor’s corner for more tips) there are the more traditional means of finding cheap flights.

1) Check prices from your three nearest airports. Flights to or from Baltimore/Washington can be dirt cheap relative to Dulles or Reagan. So try this on both destination and home port. Afew of the search engines are starting to do this.

2) Overshoot. Especially if your destination is a hub city (Atlanta, Chicago, New York). Look for cheap flights to minor destinations ($99 to Duluth!) on airlines that use your target city as a hub. Don’t check any bags.

3) Along the mid-atlantic corridor, take the train. Despite its fiscal woes, Amtrak is often a luxurious (relatively) cost-effective alternative to cattle-car flights and has often proven to be faster when congestion or weather cause air traffic delays. Amtrak is trying hard to degrade its service to the same level as the airlines, but it still hasn’t sunk that low. Oh, and since you end up in a downtown station, you save cabfare from the airport.

4) Make friends with an airline employee. Its the only way to fly on a discounted “standby” fare any more. I think its called a ‘buddy fare’ and is strictly on a space available basis.

5) Consider driving or (for a diffent kind of adventure) take the bus. Really, what’s your hurry?

No other industry (well maybe the music publishing industry) goes so far out of its way to abuse, mistreat, mislead and constantly lower standards of customer satisfaction at constantly increasing prices. But don’t get me started.

1. When traveling internationally, look for an agency — yup, a real live agency — in a neighborhood with a high percentage of citizens from the country you’re traveling to (Williamsburg for Poland, for example). Those agencies buy out huge chunks of a flight and you can get cheaper fares — I once went to the Czech Republic for $700 when everyone else was paying about $1200, and I have heard equally good things about flights to China, etc.

2. Check the American Express site. I have absolutely no idea why, but their fares are almost ALWAYS the cheapest airfares I can find after scouring all the other places listed above. You don’t need a card to buy them from AMEX, either–it’s just that the site is handy.

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