Cheap Airfares

Here's a video about finding cheap airfares from cute CNETnews reporter Kara Tsuboi.

Here are the best travel news websites:

CNN Travel - http://www.cnn.com/travel/

BBC Travel News - http://www.bbc.co.uk/travelnews

USA Today - http://www.usatoday.com/travel/

New York Times - http://www.travel.nytimes.com

International Herald Tribune - http://www.iht.com/pages/travel/index.php

The Times - http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/

Guardian - http://travel.guardian.co.uk/

Michael Bluejay suggests:

#4 Fly mid-week if you can.

Weekend flights are usually more expensive because that's when most people fly. Flying midweek usually means a cheaper fare.

Sample fares we just checked:

• $412 - Leave Sunday, return next Sunday
• $337 - Leave Monday, return next Monday
• $337 - Leave Friday, return next Friday
• $314 - Leave Tue/Wed/or Thu, return next Tue/Wed/Thu

---

#5 Using neighboring airports sometimes gets you cheaper airfares.

Several times we've saved a lot of money by flying into the Newark, NJ airport instead of into a New York airport, even though each was about the same distance from our destination in New York City. Once we saved $200 by flying into Philadelphia instead of Atlantic City, then took a $6 train ride (1.5 hours) to Atlantic City. Travelocity and Orbitz can automatically search neighboring airports for you.

Kayak is nice by assuming you want to search nearby airports, and giving you a nice list of the prices for each airport it finds (rather than dumping all the results together). It's kind of slow, but not only is the nearby-searching feature nice, it also found our sample fare for $12 cheaper than Orbitz.

#8 Book multi-city trips using the special search

If you're traveling to City A, then to City B, then returning to your original city, use the special multi-city search provided by both Travelocity and Orbitz, instead of searching for three different one-way fares.

---

#9 For U.S. to Europe, fly to London first

Kelly Fine of Alternative Wedding Ceremonies writes: "We found that it was much cheaper to fly to London on one airline and fly from London to the Continent on another airline. This seemed to be true no matter what city in Europe we wanted to go to. And it was impossible to find a cheap flight from anywhere to Bratislava, so we found a flight to Vienna, which is only a little over an hour by bus from Bratislava. Flying into central and eastern Europe is much more expensive than flying to western Europe."

---

#10 Use the proper website to search for airfare

To get the best fare you need to use the airfare search sites tailored to your situation, as listed below. You should also check at least two of the sites listed because no one site consistently gives the best fare.

For U.S. fares here's what I usually do:

1. Check Sidestep if I need specific dates (otherwise skip this step).
2. Check Travelocity.
3. Check Orbitz.
4. See if Southwest or Jet Blue can beat any of the above.
5. If not, then go directly to the airline's website for the cheapest fare that Sidestep, Travelocity, or Orbitz found, and see if the airline will give a better price directly.
6. Go with whichever of the above is cheapest.

Michael Bluejay has a great post comparing travel search engines for cheap airfares.