Best Air Ticket Prices?
 

need to book flights to Florida for Feb. What vendor would you use? Currently favoring Expedia, but do you have a better suggestion? I nixed Travelocity already -their site is horrid and you go through all the rigmarole of entering the data and three seconds later they tell you the flight you just selected is no longer availabale due to hight traffic atm and dump you back at the data entry point -wtf? it's Tues night, I'm trying to get flights from mich to flo in feb I find it hard to believe the flight sold out in the time it took to get to the confirm screen. bullshitting whatsits.


OFFS I always forget to check the heading for typos and it's the only thing I can't change -bruce/Wolf/UT, please take pity on me again

In the meanwhile, I welcome the sub/dom crowd this post will attract....

I've found that nowadays the airlines themselves offer prices just as good on their own websites. In theory it's a little extra work checking multiple websites, but I think the travel agent websites are all really user-unfriendly anyway, so the time spent seems to work out about the same.

thanks. will do that. I usually go to the sites of the cheapest find on expedia and have never found them cheaper, but forgot to do it this time.

exactly the same to the penny. will now check the car hire....

Book directly with the airline. Easier to fix screwups, and you have the whole frequent flyer thing going for you.

car rental same too

orly? have always had great service from expedia and occassionally shitty swevice from airline booked direct. thnaks for the heads up, though, will give it more consideration

thanks for the title fix, btw

According to Times 2009 50 best websites:

http://www.kayak.com/

haven't used it myself tho

Southwest books separately from all those, but the only nonstop MI to FL is detroit to orlando. Wanna get away? southwest.com .

Kayak is good. I use it and Expedia.

Actually, everyone who flies these days has to be a masochist.:cool:

I like to use Priceline and then Hotwire and then to comparison sites.

Welcome to the Cellar, pocono101. :D

You're not going to try to rent/sell us Pocono properties, right? :eyebrow:

I use travelocity with pretty good results. The key is to comparison shop not only the airlines but the travel routes.

I've been surprised to find that a trip with two stops, and whatever layovers involved, is the same price, or a few dollars more, than trips with one stop. Why would you choose two stops?

Wouldn't it be nice to get a straight flight, no stops, just once?

i've spent 13 years of my life travelling.... mostly n.america/europe.
i have never spent more than 680 canadian dollars on a return ticket from anywhere to anywhere.
everyone else i know has spent up to 2 grand for the exact same tickets.
the secret to getting these tickets cheaper is competition.
when you go to a ticket agent, their objective is to get the most money out of you that they can get....they recieve a percentage of that.
you have to shop around, and even entering that first agent, when they quote you their cheapest price on a return ticket from lets say, toronto/rome/toronto, tell them you've already found a better price....the chances are, rather than losing you as a customer, they'll find a cheaper price for you.
prices of tickets vary based on the millions of combinations they can find....it takes time for an agent to truly find a cheap combination, you've got to make them work for you.
i really don't understand why people pay 1500 or 2000 on a return ticket they can get for 650 with a little effort.

i mean thats like 1300 bucks, with lets say 6 hours of extra work.
what kind of job pays you over 200 dollars/per hour

i have no experience with purchasing tickets online, so i can't give you advice there

thanks all. they're all coming out pretty much the same at $2,100 for 5 of us with one stop each way. the only downer is a seriously early mornng departure, but I think we can suck it up....

W.HI.P in my experience in the US, the real-life agents can't hope to compete with the internet, they make a living through people who don't trust the online retailers.

Philly to Boston $1100, with a stop/plane change $300, because there's no competition. :(

That's outrageous!

I recently found a two stop, for a bit more than a one stop, for a 1000 mile trip. You'd spend more time changing planes than actually flying. Plus, more opportunities for lost luggage.

What a racket.

The place where they're really hurting is corporate clients. CEOs won't do their own online nonsense, but they've figured out that Sally in HR knows how to book it just fine. Travel agencies are dying faster than newspapers.

damn, that's fast.....

BOOKED!
 

Found tickets for 5 for $1,200 plus car hire for $375 on Expedia a few weeks ago.

Ummed and ahhed for a bit, everyone telling us it's a good price we're gonna lose it, so went on tonight, determined to book

...and lo and behold cheaper flights had appeared. 5 flights (inc all taxes etc) for less than $900. Plus an add-on car hire -full-size car for $325. we found the flight tickets on expedia, they were the same price direct from Delta plus Delta had this great car hire deal, so we went with Delta.

let me say this: DELTA'S CUSTOMER SERVICE SUCKS DONKEY BOLLOCKS. we already knew this -the morning radio DJ has a regular gripe about them, but still, this is one that has to be experienced to be believed. At one, point, the guy on the phone actually admitted there was false advertising regarding the car hire......

here's hoping we've had all the trouble we;re going to get with these flights.... but they are booked, paid and insured, and I have car booking confirmation (for what that's worth....)

Watch out Florida!

Good work Monnie you type-A acheiver.

Clod, how did you know my HR manager is called Sally? :eyebrow:

Philly to Boston for $1,100? What??? How far is that? I know it is all north-east, so it can't be too far...

'Bout 300 miles.

our tickets are not direct. quadruple the price for direct. Meh, we'll change. so, our checked luggage gets lost/is delayed in transit. we'll deal.....

: does sums in head :

Crikey.

Given all the rigmarole you have to go through to get on a 'plane these days, it is probably quicker as well as cheaper to take the train.

Or maybe even the bus.

The trains are a bit cheaper. They are in no way quicker, I assure you. We travel with Amtrak on a fairly regular basis and I have never once seen a train leave or arrive on time. But maybe they have good trains in Australia.

Good trains in Australia? :lol2:

I was thinking fondly of Japan.
Walk to subway. Train within 7 minutes. Transfer to different line. Train within 5 minutes. Transfer at bullet-train station; buy ticket from machine (maybe $50 or $100, can reserve a seat. No searches, scanners, milling about in departure lounges. Whoosh off to Tokyo or wherever at 270kph. Arrive on time about 99% of the time. And by on time I mean to the bloody minute. And the subway is right there. Door to door there is no way a plane could beat that.

It's all relative. The trains in Australia are good compared to say.....hmmmm....am going to have to think about this...suggestions anyone? In the meantime, I'll talk about what I can be sure of.

Chile-they're ok. They do the job, but in a fairly non-spectacular way from what I remember. The Santiago Metro is pretty good though, apart from at peak-hour (being short, I dislike being squashed in small spaces with strangers as I just get a view of everyone's chest and shoulders and can't breathe).

China-trains between cities aren't that salubrious (specially in cattle class and hard sleeper), but they're cheap and they get there in more safety than a Chinese aeroplane + you get to see the scenery.

Japanese trains are definitely great though. No argument with that.

Interstate trains in Australia used to have peculiar problems.

We started as six independent colonies which all built their own railways. Each made their own decisions about, for example, the guage (how far apart the two rails are). As a result, when the country federated in 1901, no state had rail lines that matched the guage of any state it shared a border with. :smack:

And it was up to the state governments to fix the problem, and no-one wanted to be the one to spend the money on changing. It took until 1992 (!!) for the federal government to force through a standardisation.
In the meantime, we used to take a train to the border and then change trains. And then we invented a machine that could remove the wheel bogeys from a railcar and replace them with different guage wheel bogeys - while the train was still moving. I went over such a machine in 1988.
Smegging bureaucracy.

Buses between NYC and Washington DC are very popular. I don't have any ridership statistics to give you, but at any time, I can walk out the front door of my office building and see a bus being loaded to go to NYC in the parking lot across the street . It's around $20-30 for the ticket, and the buses look really nice. They all offer wifi. Many of them are double decker. The sides of the buses advertise fares of only $1, but when I've gone to the website, I have never been able to find that rate.

This is amazing to me, because my experiences with buses a couple decades ago was that they suck very badly.

Around here, riding the Amtrak seems like something you'd do more for fun, than as a way to get from Point A to Point B. There just aren't that many routes that will get you where you want to go. A shame, I would love to ride the Amtrak.

Cincinatti to Ann Arbor $111 each way. takes 16 hours :eek:

(It's a 3-hour $30 gas cost drive, folks)

Ok I have another airfare ticket challenge...Santa Fe to New Orleans Dec. 21 coming back roundtrip, 4-5 days after....

Under $400.00.

did you try priceline?

are you willing to fly late on Dec 25?

Nope....

I'll try priceline....I am willing to expand dates too..

So far just travelocity, but the stay would be 2 weeks long @ 349.00....

yeah, you really have to stay over a saturday to get most cheap rates.

So, we need to get to the UK sometime in the next year or two. But we need not to pay $1200/ticket. Are there any sites/services that will watch the prices for you and alert you when a deal comes up?

I've had the best luck with southwest. Taking in to account that they fly where I am going, of course.

Holy crap. Just swim it.

I just found 750 in Feb if we go to Manchester. Much better, but still a shitload when there's 5 of us...

yeah, I should have the kids swim and we can cheer from the plane. I knew they weren't getting those ribbons for nothin'..... :lol:

Right. they don't fly to the UK, though.

So, is there a good time of year/day of the week to look? etc....

I'm giving yapta.com a try -anyone used this?

http://travel.travelocity.com/flight...tionCountry=GB

Don't know if this link will work.

When did George Michael die?

He didn't but he went off, he's dead to me now. (Was lining up music for my birthday party, gotta have a bit of 90s Wham in there. phwoar he was fit then......)

Thanks, but I can'r make that link work for me. it says $500, tells me dates that appear avaialable at that price, but won't let me select any of them?

$89 from Charl to Newark.

Surprised you need to pay for plane tickets -woulda thought you could harness all that hot air and go for free

What, he doesn't own a plane? :D

Of course not -the Demoncrats would tax him on it....

Tax and spend whores.

horse? I'd go by horse if they could swim that far....

Seahorse.

aaah. You're too smart.

Flying fish are also an option from the west coast.

My kids are Flying Fish, though -would seem a little like cannibalism.

Back to the flights. No awesome breakthroughs so far.