Cheap tickets? Forget the Net

by Jerry Guo on

Here are some tried and true tips from Rob Pelton (of National Geographic) on how to get the cheapest airline tickets. His take home message? “Low, low airfares aren’t always on the Web.” His top tips?

  • Some deals can’t be found online. That’s because many low budget airlines don’t have ticket offices accessible from the Internet, or from the Internet in the states.
  • Local ticket agents can do wonders, from taking advantage of bereavement fares to getting you discounts reserved for airline employees.
  • Fly by the seat of your pants. Go to a hub destination, like Frankfurt or Amsterdam, and then get cheap tickets from the backpacking district, where resellers often camp out.
  • Fly free! (By sitting in the cargo hold of a pilot who might be looking for some company on overnight hauls).

Midwesterners: take a post vacation vacation in Hawaii

by Grant Martin on

Continental and Northwest are currently in a bit of a fare war for each other’s Honolulu markets. So if you’re anywhere in the Midwest and could use a mini-vacation in January, check kayak for your fares; they just dropped to around the 400$ range.

Normal fares for this route are anywhere from 600 – 1500$, so this is a pretty good discount. Itineraries appear to work best traveling from Monday to Wednesday, so I would make sure to do a flex search (+/- 3 days) to make sure that you can find the best deals.

I’m getting the price out of the Detroit and Minneapolis markets but shop around, the fare could be good from elsewhere as well. Travel before the first couple of weeks in February to take advantage of the fare.

This might make a good “surprise! we’re going to Hawaii next week!” Christmas gift and is a lot less expensive than that Lexus you were about to get.

One thumb down for Kayak.com

by Jerry Guo on

This might be a controversial position, but I’m not a fan of Kayak anymore. It’s gotten rave reviews for being an all-you-can-eat airfare conglomerate that doesn’t even charge you a buck (it works to aggregate data from other for-profit aggregators like Orbitz). People have also been saying it’s great for multi-city searches and car rentals comparisons.

To all that, I say bah humbug! I just tried to book last-minute tickets to Peru using the site and the fares it gave me were completely outdated. I wasted at least an hour trying to track down a ticket that I could actually buy; each time I got excited about a fare, it would tell me the system was outdated and the ticket was no longer available.

At first it showed me some ridiculous 3-stop connections to Lima for $1,000, which is quite a steal this late in the game. But those were gone. Then it showed me some 2-stop connections for $1,200 through Spirit Airlines. But when it connected me to the airline’s site, it abruptly changed the prices to $1,500. In its defense, Kayak did get most of the erroneous data from Orbitz, which on its own suffered the same problems.

Maybe I’m just grumpy I have to pay $1,500 for the tickets.

More sales to Central and South America on American

by Grant Martin on

As Airfarewatchdog dutifully pointed out earlier today, American Airlines just released another coupon code for 20% off Central and South America.

In and of itself, the discount is pretty substantial, but when you add the fact that American already has some of the lowest prices on the market to several destinations, the savings really start to pile up.

Take San Jose, Costa Rica. I’ve been fighting several of my friends trying to schedule a bachelor party in early April and domestic tickets across the board to somewhere warm are upwards of 300$. But using this coupon code I’ve been able to price tickets to CR in around the 225$ range.

Tickets to Central America this cheap don’t come around very often.

Use coupon code DFNNWLAT by December 19th to take your discount, then travel between December 13 and May 14 ’08. More details about the discount can be found at the airfarewatchblog or AA.com

Go to Costa Rica, for me at least, and I will live vicariously through you.

Spirit Airlines’ MILF sale kicks off

by Grant Martin on

It’s great to see that the domestic low cost carriers have finally started stooping down to the international standard. While Spirit Airlines has oft been fond of strange fare sale names and promos, I think this one takes the cake: the Many Islands Low Fares or MILF sale.

My, that’s a strategically coincidental acronym, you say. I personally don’t see any corollaries beyond the innocent M-I-L-F, but in case you’re interested in any disambiguations of the term, I’d check out urbandictionary.

Sprit sales are kind of difficult to tolerate sometimes. On one hand, they have a wealth of dirt cheap (9$ – 10$) one way fares, but they make it near impossible to find a round trip ticket under those conditions. Usually you end up making up any savings from one direction with extra expense in the other direction. But if you’re rife with free time to sift through the fares and travel on odd days of the week, give it a try.

What other sexy things are airlines doing to generate interest? For starters, RyanAir’s got a semi-nude calendar of their flight attendants, and Virgin America brought scores of hot runway models on one of their flights. What’s next?