Booking a Flight the Frugal Way By MATT GROSS February 16, 2010
It used to be so simple. You wanted to go to Paris, so you called a travel agency, gave them your dates and budget, and with any luck, you soon had in your hands a real paper ticket with a real dollar value. Even in the early days of the Internet, it was easier. You went to one of the few booking sites - Travelocity or Expedia, most likely - searched for your route, paid with a credit card and that was it. Maybe you even got a paper ticket in the mail. Those were the days! Today, however, booking a flight is a total mess. Travelocity and Expedia have been joined by Bing and Orbitz and Dohop and Vayama and CheapTickets and CheapOair and Kayak and SideStep and Mobissimo and and and I could go on and list every single Web site out there, but I won't. There are just too many. Instead, I'll lead you through the steps I make when I'm booking a flight myself. I've covered this territory a bit before - here and here - but today I'll try to go into more detail. For this experiment, let's imagine a simple domestic trip: a weekend of snowboarding in Jackson Hole in Wyoming at the beginning of March. My first stop is, as it's been for years now, Kayak.com. It's the simplest airfare search engine - minimal graphics, no discount vacation deals to confuse me, and it searches almost every other site out there - and also the most flexible. I can not only choose a window for my departure and arrival times but also decide where I want (or don't want) to spend a layover, or which frequent-flier alliance to stick with. Kayak gives me two decent-looking options: $231 on American Airlines (Newark to Jackson via Chicago) and $241 for Delta (via Atlanta); taxes and fees included in both figures. I'm lucky here - I have gold status on American, so I can avoid the checked-baggage fees for my snowboard. Of course, I don't stop there. Next, I'll check ITASoftware.com, a somewhat complicated site that makes it feel as if you're a travel agent tapping into unusual, semisecret routes. Maybe there's a faster way to Wyoming, perhaps through Minneapolis? Not this time. For the Jackson Hole trip, ITA finds the same American Airlines itinerary, pricing it at $230 instead of $231. Frankly, it's a pretty normal trip, so there are no surprises. And anyway, ITA doesn't let you book tickets, instead directing you to other sites or travel agents. So, I check out another site: cFares.com, which has a twist. For a $50 annual membership, you'll get small rebates if you book through them. Each rebate may be only $8 or $20, but if you fly several times a year, that can add up quickly. And last spring, cFares found me a flight from New York to Paris for $543.17, or about $200 less than any other search engine found. For my theoretical ski trip, cFares knocks that $241 Delta flight down to $229 via the rebate (clicking the link sends you to Orbitz to book), but it doesn't bring up the American flight at all. ... http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/click-it-and-ticket-booking-a-flight-the-frugal-way/ *********************************** * POST TO MEDIANEWS@ETSKYWARN.NET * *********************************** Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
