Score some $500 tickets to Australia with STA Travel

by Grant Martin on

Jealous of all of those blokes who got in on the first round of tickets to Oz on V Australia? It’s true, some of us snagged sub $500 fares to Australia late last year when The Pacific’s newest airline started selling tickets, but it’s not too late to cash in your chips.

The latest installment in STA Travel’s “fast finger fares” give students one last chance to score that dream vacation down under. As a bonus, a welcome package with two nights of (dorm style) lodging, meals and extras is also included in the price. That’s a steal. So how do you get in?

  • Twenty packages will available at exactly 12PM on Monday, the 9th of March. That’s tomorrow.
  • You can only book the packages by going to your local STA travel or by calling (800) 360.9273, so you either need to get to your local office and sit on a travel agent or use four cellphones and call non stop starting at 11:58. Yes, you can wear your Kappa Kappa Gamma sweatpants to the STA office. No, they don’t make your butt look big.

In the worst case scenario, if you miss out on the twenty best deals, STA still has Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne on sale from Los Angeles for about $650, which isn’t a bad deal.

You can read more about the sale at STAtravel.com.

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Fare Alert! Fall Barcelona fares from New York for under $250!

by Grant Martin on

It’s that time of the year when fare sales start to come in heavy and the frugal traveler with wanderlust is fraught with options. This one, however, was too outstanding to not pass to Gadlingers:

Iberia, Spain’s national carrier, just put half of Europe on sale, starting with Barcelona and Madrid for about $250 from New York City. You can’t get to Los Angeles for that price half of the time!

But it gets better. Other destinations throughout the continent are sale, from Istanbul for $300 to Paris for a shade more.

Fares appear to be good for March and November of this year with a few fares bleeding out on either side of those dates. The key is to be flexible and patient in your search. Start at Kayak.com and search “weekends” from NYC to XXX (BCN, MAD, IST) etc, or use the “flexible dates” function to expand your search. Then, bounce over to Iberia.com and lock in tickets.

You can even get through the booking process and save your ticket for 48 hours if you want to ask your significant other for permission.

These tickets book into the Q fare class, so if you’re planning on earning American Airlines (OneWorld) miles, you’ll only get 30%. But for $244, who cares?

Search and book as soon as you can, fares this hot won’t last more than a few hours!

Yapta alerts travelers of fare drops — over Twitter

by Grant Martin on

Remember Yapta? They’re the scrappy airline website that keeps travelers informed in case their fare drops.

All that you used to have to do was log onto yapta.com, register your itinerary and watch the progress as the site automatically checked your ticket every day to let you know if changes occurred. If the price went down? You’d get an email, book your ticket and everyone would have a beer.

Now, Yapta has added the feature where they’ll Twitter you if your fare drops. Which means that if you have Twitter linked to your mobile phone, you’ll get the note immediately, dive into a cyber cafe, book your ticket on the spot and then get a beer.

But what if you have a web enabled phone and can check your emails on the road? Or what if you don’t use Twitter? Well, in that case it might not be as useful. But for the surprising number of us who do have Twitter SMS messages enabled, this service could save us a bundle. Give it a try at yapta.com.

Budget Travel: 7 Quick tips for cheap airplane tix

by Grant Martin on

Spending some time on the road this year? Chances are, you’re going to have to battle the internets for a good deal on your flight. But what to do when the prices are sky high and your wallet is recession skinny?

Most respectable travel websites out there have giant lists, strategies and flow charts about the best way to get the absolute best price. It works, but it can be complicated, and in a busy world like this, few of us have time to look through an ITA Matrix and calculate the most optimum routing.

Don’t know what an ITA Matrix is? Then keep reading for our quick tips to getting the best price on airplane tickets.

  • Flexible Flexible Flexible: There’s a reason that Kayak has a “flexible dates” option in their search engine. Traveling on Fridays and Sundays are most expensive (highest demand,) so if you can, try Thursday or Monday. Monday AM flights are often drastically less expensive and you can still often get into work by 10.
  • Book early: Probably more than a month out. Definitely more than two weeks. If it’s inside of a week, drive or take a hot air balloon.
  • Use a metacrawler: Given that we just mentioned Kayak, we should point out this important tip: Always use a metacrawler. Both Kayak and Mobissimo search engines search all of the traditional search engines on the market AND airline websites, so you can guarantee that you’re not shelling out extra cash on a third party website.
  • Check the Low Cost Carrier: Southwest doesn’t publish its fares on the regular search engines, so make sure you do a cross check at southwest.com before you book your ticket.
  • Search nearby airports: Flying out of Los Angeles? Make sure you check Long Beach (LGB,) Santa Ana (SNA) and Ontario (ONT) as well. Airports with a large LCC presence often have more competitive fares.
  • Look for coupons: As our friends at Airfarewatchdog (AFWD) recently pointed out, promo codes are the way that airlines are going this year. American, Virgin America and JetBlue are among the carriers that frequently used coupons last year and you can expect moreto come. Not sure where to find codes? Check with AFWD or your respective carrier over at flyertalk.com.
  • Consider a consolidator: For international travel, consolidators often buy tickets in a discounted block and pass the savings onto passengers. Hotwire.com and airlineconsolidator.com are both fairly simple sites that you can use, or you can always use a local (physical) source.

Finally, the best piece of advice we can give is to be patient. If you’ve got a few months before your dates of travel, set up a fare alert at Kayak. You have to create an account, but once you do, you can have the software automatically search for your fare every day and report to you when the price drops.

Fare alert! Take advantage of the fare war to Dublin!

by Grant Martin on

It’s been a little while since we’ve had a good hootenany like we’re having this weekend. Dublin, as you know, is on sale from the United States, from almost every good port of departure.

From Chicago, Grand Rapids, New York, Cleveland and many cities in the midwest, tickets are as low as $330 for travel into March. West of the Mississippi, from departures such as Los Angeles, prices are only $45 higher at $375. You can even score tickets from your local podunk airport — Bay City, Michigan is rocking prices as low as $308.

But the most jaw dropping price appears to be out of Miami, where you can score tickets for only $220 round trip. That’s outrageous!

To find tickets, start by running a flex search at Kayak.com. Use +/- 3 days if you want the best prices, then when you find a good set of tickets, bounce over to the airline of choice’s website and book tickets. Right now I’m sitting on top of some Feb 20 – 22 tickets, but seeing as I was just there, I’m a little gunshy to book.

Interested in learning more about what’s going on in Dublin? Check on Gadling’s list of 10 Things you Didn’ t Know about Dublin.