Ah, the summer of oil is almost behind us. Looking at the fare charts right now, either there is a giant fare war going on or fall fares are starting to get loaded into the system. Either way, there are some pretty fantabulous fares on the market right now (take that, airline analysts!)
Much of the fare sales seem to be centered around Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, for some reason. So do you have a few minutes to take a look and see what’s out there? Good, here’s the easiest way to do it.
- Farecompare has a neat little tool that I’ve talked about before that lets you sort fares by Price and Price Per Mile (PPM). Go to this link, plug in your city, select “North America” and click Find Fares. .
- Sort those fares by either Price or PPM (a good metric in finding good prices for long flights), then scan down the list for city pairs that you like. Departing from Detroit, the second city I found was Los Angeles, for about 200$. Sounds good.
- Farecompare’s availbility tool is kind of janky, so next, go to Travelocity, plug in the city pairs that you saw earlier and select “Flexible Search”.
- The results should bring up something near the price that you found earlier. Click that link and Travelocity will bring up a dynamic calendar that shows you what dates are available.
Not finding the dates you want? Yeah, that’s the problem with the cheapest fares — often times they depart on Wednesdays or Tuesdays. But if you’ve got the time to plan far enough ahead or a few extra dollars you can work around most of these setbacks.
Happy travels!