Getting There On The Cheap: Discount Travel Sites
10 Comments Published by Alex February 19th, 2007 in Deals, Travel. Share ThisIn his amusing little number, “A to B and Back Again: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol”, the bewigged author mentions something about how, whenever he travels to Venice or wherever, the aspects of the trip he’ll remember the most are often the flight out and the flight attendants who served his drinks. Maybe he was just bullshitting us; Warhol loved to mess with folks’ heads, and even in his writing he was so awfully deadpan that you could never really tell when he was being sincere. It’s worth noting here that he always flew first class.
I’ve been in first class a grand total of twice, both times the result of being bumped up due to overbooking. It was cool, the seat was great, the food was better, and the service more considerate. When I look at the numbers involved in that kind of upgrade, however, it hardly seems worth it. Nope, I’m a plebian traveler, and I always aim for the cheapest flight possible: Enter discount travel websites.
In my experience, Priceline, Orbitz, Discountairfare, Expedia, Travelocity, and Hotwire are the six best sites for this purpose. Actually, more and more I have found that Hotwire is the best one. It seems to be capable of finding the cheapest deals possible, lowballing Orbitz and Expedia, who have been my favorites until the last year.
I recently had to travel on a spur of the moment, to a secondary market—Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Though Mitchell Field is an international airport, it is by no means a major hub, and oftentimes it is well worth flying into O’Hare instead. Circumstances prevented this as being an option for me this time around, but I did compare the option just to make sure. With every other discount travel site, O’Hare seemed to be the cheaper destination, but somehow, Hotwire found that I could save the most amount of money on the most direct flight from the most convenient airport for me (LGA), over the most convenient time window. Hooray, Hotwire, go Hotwire. I lucked out.
That said, often times it’s been worth going directly to the airlines themselves. For example, we had a golden opportunity fall into our laps and this Friday we’ll be heading to San Juan to get the hell out of this arctic crap for a few days. Spent two days straight trying to find cheap flights through all the discount sites, but for some reason Jet Blue’s site offered the best deal; the exact same flight that we booked through them was at least $20 more through the discount sites. However, due to the huge problems Jet Blue has been experiencing lately with cancelled flights, we’re a little worried that we won’t make it after all. Wish us luck…
Have you had any glowing experiences in saving on airfare worth reporting back to us? How about the opposite – ever aim for the super saver, only to have to take a red eye on some puddle jumping turboprop, with three layovers? Know of any hot deals available right now?
10 Responses to “Getting There On The Cheap: Discount Travel Sites”
- 1 Pingback on Feb 20th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
My favorite site to search for plane tickets is http://www.kayak.com. The site is merely an aggregator of CheapTickets, Orbitz, and every major airline’s website, but what’s really cool about the site is the way you can modify your search in real time on the left side of the screen.
Yeah, I’ll second Kayak as well. Got some great tickets out to Denver in a couple weeks through them. Nice stuff. :)
It’s always worth trying the airlines direct once the discount sites have shown you who services the route you are interested in for a fair price. Often they’ll match or be a little cheaper as you’re not paying Expedia/Travelocity etc.’s commission.
In Europe many of the cheapest airlines are not available from the discount sites and again you have to go direct – EasyJet and Ryan Air are two off the top of my head.
[)amien
In my experience the best luck I’ve had with getting cheap tickets is to date/marry someone that works for the airlines (helps if they are high-up, too). I dated a girl for 3 years that was a half-assed-muckity-muck for a major airline. I tried to make it my goal to drink first-class, complimentary booze in an amount equal to or greater than my greatly reduced fare. Example: First Class RT from the ORD to Madrid: $400 for 2 tickets. Flight was aprox. 20 hours, round-trip. Can two people drink $20/hour of makers mark or tanqueray?
I’ll quit my bragging. Since we broke up two years ago, I’ve gone back to flying coach (arrrrggggghhhhh…..) and now shop strictly based on price. Kayak works well and I’ve also had good success with mobissimo.com. Those sites are much better than orbitz/expedia/etc because they search the airlines websites directly. I know that Suncountry tries very hard to limit ticket sales to their own site, so a meta-engine comes in very handy.
Best advice for flying on the cheap – get a relative who works for an airline. Ain’t nothin’ like $60 RT fares to Atlanta ;)
LAG is in Venezuela… I sure hope you meant LGA…
My bad. Thanks, Mr. Kite…fixed!
I’ve done some extensive travel in my day, and always go for the cheapest service that I can stand (ie, if I’m crossing over to the atlantic, I never go lower than austria air, it’s worth the cash) and the sites I use are expedia of course, or cheaptickets, but I’ve often found that I can build better trips myself through direct websites. Between southwest, jetblue, and iflygo, I end up spending about $200 bones to roll round trip cross country with a little planning. Half the fun of the trip is piecing together something that’s cooler than the package deals out there. Watch yer travelzoo and shermans travel for great deals on stuff, then put together a killer weekend on the cheaps (under 400 bucks is a bimonthly expense for me to go visit someplace)
It’s been mentioned…but Kayak is consistently the best. It takes the airfare search up a notch by prowling through the aggregators (Orbitz, Travelocity, etc.) as well as the primes (aa.com, etc.). Their real-time flight screening is also a huge time-saver, avoiding the endless cycle of re-loading as you tweak departure/arrival airports, dates, etc.
More importantly though, they have a feature (”Buzz”) that plots lowest recent airfare to any region of the world on a google maps interface. I use it all the time to look for regional deals (and alternative destinations). Whenever I have some pile of cash that needs to be spent, it paints a pretty compelling list of options.
Mobissimo started out strong, and SideStep generally performs well, but don’t use their crappy IE add-in.
NOTE: In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that piles of cash have been woefully absent of late.