Ticket prices to England just went down

by Grant Martin on

I’m not sure if there’s a secret sale going on or someone at US Airways messed up the feed today, but ticket prices to the UK for summertime travel just went down. This means that instead of paying 1200$ for that ticket from Chicago to London you now might be able to get away with about 600$. Quite an excellent price for summertime travel.

The fare sale seems to be centered solely around US Airways routes between the United States and London (LON) and Manchester (MAN) with travel between Monday and Thursday. If you’d like a dandy tool to check availability, use this Farecompare link to view a calendar. Plug in your favorite airport in the departure box to check if the fare is available from your city.

London not where you want to go? Consider booking your transatlantic leg into London then booking a separate ticket from there to your final destination (it’s called nesting). You can either go through a canonical search engine like Kayak or Opodo, or try your luck at a Low Cost Carrier via flylc.com.

Happy summer travels.

Alert! Dallas and Los Angeles to Hawaii for under $200!

by Grant Martin on

Doing anything March1? A secret/mistake fare on American Airlines and United just popped up where you can get a ticket from Dallas or Los Angeles to Hawaii from March 1st to the 3rd or 4th for just under $200.

Run a flex search on Kayak or Travelocity around those dates and it’ll come up, but you’ve got to hurry — this fare definitely won’t last long.

Both United and American have 24 hour cancellation policies, so if there’s any question, book now and ask questions later.

Aloha!

Another Virgin America 20% off code

by Grant Martin on

If any of you blue-staters want to get out to the opposite coast over the next eight weeks or so, Virgin America just released another 20% off code that should make your journey less expensive.

While the market values the Virgin America’s tickets seem to be slightly above the norm across the board, this code should knock prices down a bit lower. As always though, double check Kayak.com to see what other carriers like Frontier and Jetblue are offering before you pull the trigger.

Even if the price is close, you may want to consider Virgin for the swanky mood lighting and inflight entertainment. I’ve been itching to give the airline a try myself, but have yet to break free from the constraints of Midwest living. Some day soon, I hope.

Use code FLYVIRGIN to take the discount off your ticket. Travel must be between Feb 18 and May 21.

Farecast launches international ticket comparisons; prices still suck

by Grant Martin on

Farecast just unrolled a new feature of their software that lets you compare international ticket prices. You could search for them before, mind you, it’s just that you couldn’t compare and research them.

According to this year’s pile of data, international prices are 11% higher than 2007, with the Chicago–Paris route showing the steepest increase of 23%. Of course this doesn’t factor any sale fares into the equation, which could be outside of the norm and which many bargain hunters will end up booking.

And that’s much of the reason that I’ve been slow to adopt Farecast’s mechanism. So many international tickets that I purchase are booked on sale and last minute fares that the canonical data they provide are useless for me. But if you’d like to get a good ballpark price for how much your tickets are going to cost, give it a go.

When to use and avoid Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia

by Grant Martin on

Online travel agents like Orbitz, Priceline, Travelocity and Expedia are handy, touchy-feely tools that many Internet users find useful when booking hotel and airline reservations. It’s important to keep in mind, though, that these tools are travel agents, and just like the travel agent down at the local strip mall, they take a commission from any booking you make. Conversely, since airlines control inventory, they should have the best idea of what prices and volumes they have and 99% of the time will offer the best price. Most airlines even have best price guarantees to promote this.

There are, however, instances in which an online travel agent are useful. In addition to the easy-to-use interfaces, areas in which the TA might help are if they were to:

  • Have negotiated a discount (ie, corporate or consolidator) with the airline. In this case you need to pay particular attention to the fare class that you’re booked in; many consolidator tickets, for example, some from airfare.com or your local Chinatown TA don’t qualify for frequent flyer miles.
  • Combine a series of tickets into one itinerary. For example, last April when I was trying to find a cheap ticket to Buenos Aires I checked all of the canonical search engines and could only find tickets for 1100$. Orbitz, however came up with a price that was 300$ cheaper. Why? Because they found a fare sale between Washington DC and Argentina on Delta and nested it into a regular Northwest DTW-WAS 100$ flight. Result? Net savings of three hundred bucks. Typically, standard airlines wont search and book outside of their service, so their websites can’t do this.

If you’re really comfortable with the Expedia or Travelocity interface (I know, some of the airline websites are kind of lame), try using them to do your basic fare searching. If you find a standard ticket from point A to B on one airline, bite the bullet, go to that airline’s website and book the ticket there. It should save you a few bucks in the end.

10 tips for smarter flying