More Tips for Cheap Airfares

by Jamie Rhein on

No matter how many articles about cheap airfare there are, there’s always room for another. Here’s one of the latest. In “8 tips to snag the lowest fare” Karen Aho gives some tips we’ve covered before, such as, check with sites like Travelocity and Expedia for the lowest prices, then go directly to the airline’s Web site. Karen mentions another advantage of doing this. In addition to a cheaper rate, by booking through the airline, you’ll get email messages from the airline.

When seeking out cheap flights, she suggests thinking about how a business traveler might think and do the opposite. Business travelers tend to travel at the beginning of the week and at the beginning of the day or the end of the day, therefore think middle of the week and middle of the day. As Karen points out, this doesn’t always work, but it’s a starting point.

What I found interesting is that you should look well in advance for cheap flights, as in several months if possible. The 21 day advance flights may not have the cheapest seats left. That’s certainly true with Skybus. And when booking, don’t hesitate since thousands of people are seeking out flights at the same time you are. I hesitated on booking Skybus and it cost us $100 per ticket. However, when we went to Florida last December, I assumed flights would be expensive since we didn’t start looking until the beginning of November. I was amazed to find flights for $160 round-trip from Columbus.

Checking alternative airports is also a great strategy. I’ve found this particularly true when traveling to New York City. Between Newark, La Guardia and JFK there seems to be a cheap flight somewhere. The downside is the cost and ease of getting in to and out of Manhattan, but even that is getting competitive.

To see if a fare is going up, Karen suggests checking with Farecast. This site tells what fares will go up or down over a 7-day period for specific airlines. The idea behind this is that you can decide to buy now or wait.

Another strategy that might work is being nice. For example, Karen switched seats twice on an airplane after being asked and was so nice about it that the flight attendant put her in first-class. This strategy also can work on merry-go-rounds. When I took my son to the Ohio State Fair, one woman asked if my son would switch horses so she could sit next to her son. When he switched, she gave me two ride tickets.

The Colours of First Class

by Martha Edwards on

It’s almost physically painful for me to look at pictures of the fabulous first-class amenities that many long-haul airlines offer. Picture me on my last long flight from New Zealand, spending 12 hours trying to sleep in an upright position with the elbow of a 300-lb Maori man next to me (I feel more sorry for him than myself — he could barely squeeze into the seat.) Seriously — how great would be to kick back on a cross-Pacific flight in this kind of setting?

From a design perspective, first class is even more spectacular. I’ve never really considered it before, but the color and decor on a plane can have a lot to do with your overall experience, don’t you think? You want your plane to looks bold without being too overpowering; contemporary and sleek without being uncomfortable. Methinks drab shades of grey and brown will make the passengers feel drab, bored, maybe ever trapped. That said, if I had a choice between bright colours in coach and drab ones with a chair that folded into a bed and my own private nook with a TV, I could most definitely deal with drab.

Does this mean you should pick an airline based on the colour? I guess if you’re flying first class, you can afford to.

Band on the Run: Re-United with Lost Guitars (The Precipice of Air Travel)

by Ember Swift on

Ember Swift, Canadian musician and touring performer, will be keeping us up-to-date on what it’s like to tour a band throughout North America. Having just arrived back from Beijing where she spent three months (check out her “Canadian in Beijing” series), she offers a musician’s perspective on road life. Enjoy!

So I got on a flight out of Maui, Hawaii at 9:30pm island time on Friday and arrived in San Francisco at 5:30am PST. A quick transfer to my (already being held) Vancouver flight and I was back in the air and heading towards my band and the next gig…

without my guitars.

What is it with United? I have had more mishaps (re: lost baggage or stolen luggage) with this airline than any other.

[I guess in this case the transfer time was too tight because no one from that Maui flight who arrived in Vancouver got their luggage. But still, the stats are stacked against United and me. Am I alone here?]

What’s worse is that the call center is in India. The attendants speak English and are very polite, but they’re in India! While trying to track y guitars, I needed to give a geography lesson on Canada while giving my delivery address:

“No, it’s a province. Canada doesn’t have states. It’s the province of British Columbia. <pause> No, there’s no zip code. The equivalent is a postal code. <pause> Yes, postal code. There are letters and numbers. It’s…”

And still, they couldn’t locate them. They told me to call back in a few hours and hopefully their computers will have been updated.

I was reunited with my band without my guitars and there was no time to wait for them to (possibly) arrive on the next flight from San Francisco. The gig that night was in Grand Forks, BC, in the interior of the province about six hours east of Vancouver, and so we had to hop in a vehicle and drive on in order to make it there in time for sound check.

This part of British Columbia is truly stunning. It’s hard to stay grumpy in the presence of such majestic beauty. By the time we got to Grand Forks, I was long recovered from my sleepless night of air travel and the anxiety of lost instruments.

Mountains heal.

We were kindly loaned a guitar that worked out perfectly (a hollow body electric the same shape and similar weight to my Gretsch) and I just geared the whole set to suit an electric guitar sound as opposed to an acoustic. We had a great time on stage and were well received by the modest but appreciative audience at The Festival at the Forks.

They put us up that night at a hilltop spa called Ponderosa Pines. Three kilometres up a rocky dirt road and it felt like we were driving into the clouds. There was nothing around except the view and a steep decline. This single lane path (or was it a long driveway?) seemed to be etched into the side of the mountain itself.

Adam, our drummer, said “These are the times people accuse you of exaggerating when you re-tell the story. You just keep saying ‘no, it really was like that’ and no one believes you.” And he’s right. Maybe these pictures I snapped the next morning will give it some credibility.

Back in the car again pointing west again towards Vancouver and we were following a Budget cube van. When it’s brakes came on suddenly ahead and it swerved right, we slowed too, just in time for us both to miss the young black bear that had leapt out of the bushes and struck out across the highway.

Just the night before, while sitting beside a British guy returning from Maui to the U.S. with his family mid-vacation, we spoke about Canada and all the cultural stereotypes of our country. He jokingly said, “Yeah, Canada, aren’t you shaking the black bears off your legs up there?” I laughed and told him that our legs have no room for black bears for all the beavers trying to take us out at the ankles. We both laughed then and I added the truthful statement that it had actually been ages since I’d even seen a black bear.

Not so now.

And I’m happy to report that the little black bear survived the highway.

When we got back to Vancouver, the guitars still had not arrived at the address we’d given. Another call to India and I found out that one guitar was still in San Francisco and the other was in Vancouver and was supposed to have already been delivered.

Now the reports were starting to conflict and I had memories of last year’s “missing” (read: stolen) pedal board that resulted in a $2,000 insurance claimed and a long fight with the airline. Also, this summer Adam’s custom snare drum (also on United Airlines) took two weeks to be returned to him. When my anxiety level started to spiral upwards, I knew it was time to run.

Running is my release of choice.

Forty minutes later, all stress having sweated out my body, I arrived back to where I was staying to a message telling me that both “red bags” (my cases are red, but the attendants rarely referred to them as guitars, much to my concern!) would be delivered that evening between 9 and 12 at night.

Nothing to do but wait. My flight back to Ontario wasn’t until today anyway.

11:48 on the hall clock and I got a call saying that they were just a few minutes away. To my relief, at 11:56 I was greeting the delivery man and my guitars at the doorway of the house we were staying in. Now earlier today, I flew back to Ontario with my (hopefully not-to-traumatized) guitars who haven’t made it out of their cases since Hawaii. I was so hesitant to let them disappear down the conveyor belt yet again!

But I’m here to report a great big sigh of relief.

When I picked them up in Ottawa, I loudly and gregariously thanked the special handling baggage personnel for not losing them. They laughed and responded with a hearty “You’re welcome!” while I was letting out my held breath.

And now I’m home. On the ground. Guitars in hand.

All’s well.

Reunited.

USA Today’s 25 Best Travel Changes in the Last Quarter Century

by Neil Woodburn on

In celebration of USA Today turning 25, the editors of the American newspaper are publishing a variety of top 25 lists. This week, they tackle the “25 pivotal changes that transformed the way we travel.”

Want to take a guess what they are?

Well, number one on the list is something that we all personally use quite often: online booking. I can’t even remember how we bought tickets before. Didn’t we have to telephone the airlines or something like that? I know I booked a lot of my tickets pre-internet with STA travel, a student travel agency that is still going strong these days.

The next “pivotal change” that I was most excited about in the last quarter century was certainly the prohibition of smoking onboard an aircraft. I never actually flew on a smoking flight and simply can’t imagine what hell that must have been like, but I know how much I’d hate it today and simply can’t believe that this life-saving regulation doesn’t appear on the USA Today list until number 5.

It’s rather fun checking out all 25 “pivotal changes” and realizing that so many of them, like the anti-smoking laws, are so commonplace in the travel industry that it is now hard to imagine life without them. For a quick peek at the top five, check out the list below, or jump on over to USA Today to read about all 25.

1. Online booking
2. TSA airport security
3. Airline e-tickets
4. Roll-aboard luggage
5. Smoke-free flights

Northwest Airlines and Airport Discoveries

by Jamie Rhein on

Last Wednesday, when I took my dad to the airport so he could catch his Northwest flight back to Newburgh, New York, I parked the car so we could have a longer visit. Even though I haven’t flown Northwest for awhile, I have thousands of miles saved up in its frequent flier program. They are so hard to use, and I keep finding cheaper flights on other airlines. Being that it’s been awhile, there have been some changes since my last flight.

As my dad used the check-in kiosk, I saw on the computer screen a $15 symbol on some of the seats. This is not brand new, but it was new to me. Over a year ago, the airlines started offering passengers the option to pay for more leg room. The seats with the $15 were the seats still left with the extra leg room. (Read USA Today article.) My dad got one of these seats because he’s a Silver Elite member. Most of the other seats were taken, but there were about 4 of the $15 seats left. What this means, I don’t know. Maybe most people aren’t willing to pay for the extra leg room.

What my dad also got was a quick trip through security. At the Columbus International Airport, if you are a member of certain frequent flier programs, or have some sort of preferred flier status, you can use the special security line. As opposed to the several people waiting with their socks off in the lines for the masses, my dad breezed through.

Next time I fly, I’m going to see if my frequent flier miles will at least get me a fast trip to the gate. I am looking into booking flights for next summer. Denmark is on our list and we have enough miles saved up for the four of us to get there. The problem is, it’s hard to plan that far enough in advance when we are working out the details of life in the here and now.

By the way, if you are waiting at the Columbus airport, Wendy’s offers the cheap menu. Hamburgers are $1. Just one more deal my dad pointed out.