Ways to find good deal on air ticket

April 5th, 2006

Spent sometime since yesterday on helping my parents to get some good deal on international travel, since this is personal travel, we have to find ways to reduce the cost without sacrificing the convenience. To summarize what I have learned and hope this can help you reduce the time spent on future travel planning.

For domestic travel, use web airline search engine. Don’t waste time calling your favorite travel agent. To start, ITA search engine is a feature-packed and easy to use web service. It gives you the rock bottom ticket price with reasonable alternatives displayed in a GUI chart. Use ITA help you making the decision on when/which airline has the right flight with the price you would like to pay. You cannot book directly on ITA site, but you can go directly to the airline booking website, for example, www.nwa.com, using the flight info you got from ITA to book the ticket. Be careful, some airline will first display the ticket price without tax to grab your attention, this might be lower than ITA price quote you find earlier, but after the tax added, the airline price should be the same.

An alternative to go directly to the airline website is to go throught one of the three major online aggregator: Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz. You should expect to see the same price returned from ITA. The actual result might vary a little (less than $5) among the three. The benefits of going ITA first is that you have much powerful comparison shopping tools available from ITA.

Another cool website that I found useful is travelocity dream map, yahoo it gives you an visual map to tell you the lowest fare possible to all destination in the world within the next month or so. This assumes you are flexible on the schedule, for personal trips, who cares it starts on Mon or Wed? A similar purposed web site is air-fare.com. The link for these two services are all started from RDU in favor of my local buddies, change it for your own need. This can quickly tell you which cities are relative cheaper for you to travel…

For international travel, it is a totally different beast. This time, you should call your travel agent. Unlike domestic air fare, all international air fare is moderated by the government of each country. This means airline cannot arbitrarily reduce the ticket price to win the competition, so don’t expect to see some good price from airline directly. What happens is airline usually sold volume of international air ticket to travel agencies at discount price, the travel agency adds some thin mark-up and resell the ticket to us, here the price is still cheaper than the price you can get from aa.com (unless it is a promotion which runs for a very short while).

But just before you call the travel agent, use ITA and Dream map to help you get a rough idea on how much is expected. Once you get the rough idea, you can call the travel agent. Now that you are prepared, you can tell the travel agent what you want and how much you would like to pay. This way, there is a much bigger chance that you will land a good deal..

Entry Filed under: Travel