Working all the Intertnet Services out there for Cheap Flight Tickets
As easy as the Internet and all related technology are supposed to have made our lives, conceptually, things are much harder to get a grasp of these days. It used to be that if you needed to go across the Atlantic, all you needed to do was to call up a travel agency, tell them how much you were willing to spend and what dates you were willing to work with, and before long, there would be a real physical ticket headed your way and it would be worth a real sum of money too. And when travel found the Internet, at first, things only got better. There was maybe Expedia and maybe Travelocity to help get you a reasonable deal, and you were happy to take it feeling grand to have travel-agent tools in the palm of your hand. If you were lucky, you even got a proper ticket in the mail soon. Internet travel has been furiously working at finding ways to cut prices for a decade now though and cheap flight tickets are a reality in a way that could not have been possible back then. But the price we pay for it in other ways!
The two grand old players are still around, but they are surrounded by literally dozens of other Internet travel websites working very hard to make all our collective decision-making lives a living hell. There is Kayak, CheapTickets, Mobissimo - just too many to list. So if all you want is a set of cheap flight tickets to get from A to B, how do you work the system without feeling guilty over any steps you left out or feeling bad about how crazy all of it is driving you? Let me share with you the system I use myself when I need to go about the country or outside on business or pleasure. Let's take a simple trip from New York, out to the beaches of Miami where it should be nice and warm now. I like to start out with my rooting around at Kayak; this one is a meta-search engine - that is to say, it checks out all the other notable travel sites out there to report to me about. It also has a really minimalist layout, and no bombardment of advertising all over the place. As minimal as it is, it also gives me a few really good choices: for instance, I can specify what city I would prefer to have my layover at and also lets me specify my choice of frequent flier plan to use.
So the moment I make my first attempt for my cheap flight tickets, I get two search windows from Expedia and Priceline; I have a quote for $328 all included, on American and it seems pretty reasonable. And it's just as well, because with my membership, I can get free checked baggage. But I'd just like to see what else the deep dark world of the Internet has in store for me, and I turn to ITASoftware.com. This website is not your bright and cheerful user friendly kind. You can't even buy your tickets here - just learn about the fares. It is kind of impenetrable and makes you wonder if it was designed for some kind of travel professional. In fact the way it looks, Iwouldn't be surprised if on some back page, I found some special supersecret inside tips that only travel agents would otherwise know. It doesn't really have any news for me other than to save me five dollars on the same flight I found on Priceline.The kind of hoops I will jump through for a couple of cheap flight tickets!
I think that at this time, I should turn my attention to cFares.co (does the c stand for Cheap?). This happens to a members-only website. You pay them a $50 membership for the year, and for each ticket you buy through them, it will shave about $20 off. Sometimes, you can get really lucky with them - last time on a trip to Asia, I found a fare here that was a full $150 cheaper than anywhere else. Anyway right now, cFares isn't willing to be any more generous than to knock it down to $301 - for a flight on Continental. They don't even say anything about the American flight I saw before on Expedia. Still, that's pretty good compared to what the others are willing to give me. Now I'm just about ready to buy, except that I have a little niggling doubt - what if a couple of days after I buy, the fares fall $50? Is there any way to tell which way the fares are headed in the near future? For us fans of cheap flight tickets, they do have such a service, and it's called Yapta.com (there is competitor called for Forecast.com, but that has been bought out by Bing).
Actually, Yapta feels that the prices will go down $18 in two days, so I think I'll wait. If I wanted to fly international, I first head for Vayama. They have lots of deals no one else in the world has. But of course when you fly long-distance like this, there is always the calculus of whether getting a cheap flight would make more sense than getting a slightly more expensive flight with lots of frequent flyer miles. Other than that, I would be happier flying on Tuesdays and Wednesdays when most of the time, the airlines charge a little less for some inexplicable reason. Somehow, going for the cheap flight tickets on these scientifically designed bargain-hunting websites doesn't always make all the sense. As much as these are a great way to find a low cost of flight, you don't always get all the special deals airlines have in mind, and you don't get your frequent flyer miles either. And sometimes, when the computers get it all wrong, at the airport, the clerk won't be able to blame it on some travel website.