The New York Times’ article, Beating the Bushes for a Bargain Ticket, breaks down nine tips for finding cheap flight deals in today’s air travel world. A few of them are no-brainers, but heck, there’s a large no-brain market out there.
Here’s the Times’ advice, with my notes after:
Book Directly With The Airline
Sign Up For Private […]
The Associated Press reports on the best time to book flights:
The co-founder of Lessno.com, a Web site that offers international flights, says it does matter.
“Our experience with airlines has shown us that they update available seats around 12 a.m. Eastern time every day,” said Assen Vassilev, who is also the company’s CEO.
He added that weekend […]
It used to be site59, now it’s LastMinute.com — a decent site catering to couples traveling together and looking for last-minute deals — no more than seven days in advance.
The folks at moneyfortherestofus.com wrote up a situation-specific guide for finding cheap flights.
If covers topics like:
If you have Fixed Dates and a Fixed Place
If you have Fixed Dates and a Fixed Place, and your travel dates are within the next few weeks
If you have flexible dates (Kayak Buzz, Airfare Watchdog, Farewatch, Mobissimo, and Farecast)
If you […]
I’ve got a three-prong strategy for finding the cheapest and best flight fares these days. It’s not complicated, but it takes a little effort.
Bookmark your town’s low-fare list on Air Fare Watchdog. Check it weekly, and when you’re ready to book a flight check it daily. This site finds fares you’re unlikely to get anywhere […]
I have never seen a flight-fare search program do this before: List the cheapest fares for one route for an entire month. This one does that, and it does more. Here’s a screenshot of the best deals when flying from Chicago to Denver in December:
You have to register before you can use it, and it’s free to use, and it’s well worth it. Check it out at http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch/
Business traveler Brad DeLong sleuths out some sketchy business practices on JetBlue’s Boston to West Coast flights: The planes don’t have enough gas to make it when the headwinds are strong:
Thus a six hour flight that would be turned into a six and a half hour flight by strong headwinds is instead turned into an eight hour flight by an involuntary refueling stop in Salt Lake City.
The folks at Airport Public Transit Directory put together a list of public transit options for major and medium cities across the U.S. Take a look at the list here.
They also have a list of airports that don’t have public transit options:
They don’t have any information for the Greensboro, North Carolina, or Spokane Washington airports yet. I’m sure there are other cities missing too. Still, three cheers for people putting together useful information on the web.
From TechCrunch:
Purchasing flights purely based on price has been around for a while, but the consumer has never had the power to quickly and at a glance evaluate the cheapest days to fly nor the cheapest destinations to fly to. Flyspy reverse engineers some of the mystique associated with the airline industry and makes it extremely transparent.
The way it works is that I give it a departure city and a destination city and optionally a departure date and length of stay. The search result, which returns very quickly, will present me with a graph of flight prices over the next 30 days so that I can quickly look at which days are the cheapest to fly. To book a flight I just click on the point in the graph. Simple.
Looks awesome. Check out the alpha site here (only works for Minneapolis-bound flights to select destinations), and read TechCrunch’s breakdown of FlySpy here.
Wednesday, says Travelocity. That is, if you’re flying domestic, and your trip is within the next two weeks. Travelocity says all airlines release tickets each Wednesday for weekend travel this weekend and next. So says CNN.com here in The best time to buy everything…