Finding Cheap Plane Tickets
I have a few sites I use for finding the cheapest
airline tickets. You may want to add a couple of others
depending on which airlines fly into your closest airport. In
your quest to overcome your fear of flying you will probably
take a trip or two. The less expensive that is the better.
Maybe someday you'll even learn to love flying!
|
ITASoftware
- The ULTIMATE free
search tool for cheap plane
tickets. You don't actually
book through this site, you do your
searches and then book either through
a discount site like Orbitz or
directly through the airline's
website. This site will
search many airlines at once,
shows you all the options sorted by
price, date, etc... BUT the best
feature is the weekend search/month
long search. If your travel dates are
flexible you can very easily see
which days are the cheapest narrowed
by airline, number of nights stayed,
etc. I know some other travel booking
sites do this, but this site has no
graphics so it loads faster and is
arranged in a much more user friendly
way. It's commonly used by travel
agents, but you can login as a guest
and get unlimited free access to a
very powerful search tool.
Orbitz -
because I can see seat availabilty
without having to go through the
purchase process. When picking a flight
I want to be sure I can get the perfect
seat for me.
Southwest
Airlines -
because they don't show up on the ITA
search and do have some cheap
prices.
JetBlue doesn't fly out of my airport, but I
would use their site, too, if they did.
I think they're a cool
company.
Hopefully these resources
will save you a few bucks in the process of
booking your next trip.
Tip: When
booking close to the departure date (vs 3
months ahead of time) don't forget to consider
2 one way tickets instead of a regular round
trip. I recently saved over $100 by booking 2
one ways using different airlines, and had a
lot more flexibility in choosing the best
flight times for me.
|
Tip: Booking through
discount travel sites is usually more expensive than booking
directly through the airline's website. This is because most
discount sites charge a "booking fee" of $5 or more, which is a
pointless expense in my opinion. You can just as easily click
over to the airline's main website and book there without extra
fees. However, as a curtesy to Orbitz, if I needed to use their
site for seat research because I couldn't get it on the main
airline's site, then I will sometimes book through them as
"payment" for that feature.
|