Download the software “DING” from Southwest. I live in Portland, OR and I travel to the east coast every month. I just booked my trip for Feb. and I paid $49 each way to Manchester, NH. I have never paid more than $99 each way using the DING software. The deals you can get are unbelievable. You just have to wait until the month before you travel to book.
One of the best tips we’ve found lately is that increasingly, airlines are saving their best fares for their own Web sites. Not just Southwest, which doesn’t file fares with Travelocity et al, but Alaska, which has frequent 20% off sales; Spirit (which just had a site-only $24 off sale); USA3000 which has frequent coupon sales, Frontier, which only sells its weekend sales on site; and many international airlines such as SAS, Qantas, and Singapore to name a few.
I’m suspicious of aggregators after a bad experience with FareCompare:
They showed a ridiculously good fare for one that was horribly expensive everywhere else. Being an aggregator, they wouldn’t actually book it for me. Their FAQ claimed that they had access to flight information hours before the other travel sites, so I should wait a few hours and then book it. Well, I waited…and waited…and waited…and fares only went up.
I sent them an email asking how to actually get their fares…no reply.
So maybe they really did a great ticket price, availability was limited, and someone else beat me to it. Maybe they had a database error. Maybe they were lying to me. It doesn’t really matter…whatever the reason, their data can’t be trusted. If you wait as they say, you’ll just give prices a chance to go up more.
Now I only believe ticket prices listed on sites that sell tickets. The aggregator can be useful to tell you what other website to go look on first, but if that second website doesn’t list Kayak’s price, the aggregator is wrong. Don’t wait, look elsewhere.
I also have learned not to book through Travelocity after a bad experience with them a year ago. I cancelled the second half of a ticket when work sent me from Christmas vacation onto a business trip. They told me I could call them and claim the credit when I next booked through them with the same airline (United). I did so. They told me the ticket number wasn’t in their system (or some any other information I gave them - I had the original confirmation email and everything they’d told me when I called them to cancel) and transferred my call to United. United told me that my ticket number didn’t start with the right prefix to be one that they issued and couldn’t help me either. Lesson learned: just book with the airline directly and skip the run-around if something goes wrong.
Summary: window-shop with the aggregators or conventional travel sites. Go book with the airline. If the airline doesn’t actually have the same price, use a different aggregator.
For hotels I usually use a combination of Farechase and TripAdvisor. Farechase is nice because you can search by location on a map (which is killer) and TripAdvisor is great for gathering opinions of hotels as well as checking prices from Expedia.com, Orbitz.com, Hotels.com, Travelocity, and Accorhotels.com all with a single search box.
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