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Posted by
George Hobica on Thursday, July 24, 2008 at 2:38 PM to
Airfare Tips
With fares going higher, and low fare seats getting scarcer, there is no better time than now to brush up on your flexible date search skills. If you don't particularly care when you fly as long as there's a cheap fare, flexible is the way to go.
To help you, we've put together this nifty chart (we're all about charticles these days, have you noticed?) and some important tips to help you distinguish between the various Web sites offering flex search.
Most sites let you search only over a 30 day period of your choice, both for the outward bound and the return flight (these include Cheaptickets, Hotwire, and Orbitz). Allegiant and Southwest, however, allow you to search over one 30 day period on the outbound and any other on the return. Then there are Travelocity and Cheapair, both of which allow a 330 day search. Only problem is, they're not very good at guaranteeing that there will be seats available at the fares initially shown in the search, whereas the other sites do a better job at this (the reason is that these searches take up a lot of computer processing power, and you can't have it both ways: a long date range search, or better seat availability predictions).
And there are other distinctions between search sites, as the chart below shows. Some do one-way searches, others don't; most allow you to search for more than one seat, Travelocity doesn't; some do searches on routes from the US and Canada to international destinations (even if they say they don't); and others do not. And some charge fees, others give you a free ride.
Alaska Airlines in July (2008) added a nice 30 day search; and American has had a 31 day search for quite a while, as has Southwest. But most airlines are limited in their flexible date searches, which is a shame.
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Posted by
George Hobica on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 at 6:50 PM to
Airline Industry News
That's the rumor, anyway. For quite a while, AA has been enticing travelers to buy tickets only on its own site, aa.com, with its DealFinder widget, which offers 10 to 30% off on various routes with the use of promo codes.
According to this blog post, cash-crunched American no longer wants to pay double booking fees to both Kayak and Orbitz (fares found on American via Kayak are sent not to aa.com but to Orbitz.com for booking).
Southwest, of course, already does very nicely by not listing on Kayak or any other site. So perhaps American is thinking, hey, why can't we go it alone too?
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Posted by
George Hobica on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 at 2:15 PM to
Airline Industry News
Alaska Airlines joins the small club of airline web sites with a 30-day flexible date search (see how it works). American has a 31-day search (domestic roundtrips only) and Southwest has their "ShortCut" which allows you to search any 30 day period outbound and any other 30 day period on the return. But most airline sites just do a 1 to 3 day flexible date search, if they offer it at all.
Alaska's new product allows you to:
- View an entire month of fares for your chosen destination(s) and see the lowest fare available for each day of the month
- View lowest fares for both outbound and return flights
- Filter your search to only display First Class fares
- View your total fare in an easy-to-use Trip Summary table
However, for fares to Mexico, the search range is only 3 days.
There are still lots of low fares out there, but increasingly you have to be extra flexble in your travel dates to nab them. So kudos to Alaska for making it easier to do so.
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Posted by
George Hobica on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 7:56 PM to
Airline Industry News
Big changes at United Airlines and it'll hit you right in your pocketbook:
- Laying off 7000 workers
- Cutting domestic seat capacity 15.5 to 16.5 percent
- Retiring 100 jets
Read the press release to see what else they're up to.
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Posted by
Bo Borre on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 2:51 PM to
Europe/Africa/Middle East Airfares
Scandinavian Airlines is having a sale for late summer and fall travel, with Delta hot on its flaps and Continental likely to catch up sooner or later, and we've got it all wrapped up for you. First off, these deals are no screaming bargains, but then the only screams we hear around here these days is when the hair pulling gets too intense—no happy outbursts, no songs of joy, let alone rapturous rhapsodies, just endless grousing and grumbling peppered with a few choice expletives we have to keep under wraps.
In fact, for travel to this part of the world there hasn't been much to raise our voices about since the spring of 2007, when Malaysia Airlines still offered nonstop fares from Newark to Stockholm for as little as $380 round-trip, before some spiteful bean counter apparently realized that this was no way for an airline to make money and his boss took the route so far up-market in a desperate do-or-die move you can just forget them!
If you were paying attention, we did alert you earlier on this blog to a small price war that raged uncharacteristically for a couple of days in mid-May, with peak summer fares to Copenhagen going for well under $600 (I was lucky enough to get a ticket and will be going soon, so please be sure to miss me). Since then things have been very quiet on the Northern front, and this non-event probably won't do a whole lot to upset the peace.
As far as we can tell, prices have merely returned to the more reasonable levels seen earlier this year, so it's a little like getting a second chance. Still, that's small comfort and the nicest thing we can say about this sale is that fares are actually a bit better than advertised. Now, that's a lot like getting excited about the extra meat in your gourmet wrap, until you remember that it's still just chicken and you're still paying too much for it. But, hey, if you're hungry, you gotta eat, doncha?
Well, folks, that's a wrap!
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Posted by
George Hobica on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 11:09 AM to
Airline Industry News
Sorry, Ontario, you won't have JetBlue after Sept 3, 2008, and will cut seat capacity by 10 percent and has no plans to grow capacity in 2009. Read the press release. If you've already purchased seats on the New York JFK to Ontario nonstop route for travel after Sept 3, you can get a refund, or ask the airline to switch you to Long Beach or Burbank.
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Posted by
George Hobica on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 10:47 AM to
Domestic US Fares
Starting Sept 1, ExpressJet will no longer be flying as an independent carrier and will go back to serving as a regional affiliate for Continental Express, serving over 150 destinations.
Meanwhile, they're having a goodbye sale for travel August 13 to September 1, with a 14-day advance purchase and a $50 change fee, should you need to change travel dates. All fares can be bought one-way, with no round-trip purchase required.
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Posted by
George Hobica on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 10:38 AM to
Domestic US Fares
You'll get the lowest fares by traveling on a Tuesday or Wednesday. Airtran sells all of its fares one-way with no roundtrip purchase required. Travel through Nov 12 except Sept 1. See all fares in this sale.
Also, to its credit, Airtran doesn't (yet) charge extra for the first checked bag, and its ticket change fee is just $75, compared to $150 on some airlines.
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Posted by
George Hobica on Monday, July 21, 2008 at 10:25 AM to
Airline Industry News
In what is perhaps a harbinger of worse things to come, Midwest Airlines is cutting service to the following cities on Sept 8:
- Ft. Lauderdale
- Ft. Myers
- San Diego
Midwest Connect, their regional jet service, will discontinue flights to:
- Baltimore
- Hartford
- St. Louis
- San Antonio
- Louisville
Milwaukee-Orlando service will become seasonal, operating from October to April only.
Previously, the carrier eliminated service to Austin, Charlotte, Colorado Springs, and Duluth.
Midwest has asked its employees for substantial pay cuts. We suggest that you purchase flights on Midwest with a credit card and complete travel on such purchases no more than 60 days from time of purchase, in order to be protected under the Fair Credit Billing Act.
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Posted by
George Hobica on Friday, July 18, 2008 at 10:59 AM to
Airline Industry News
As Ben Mutzabaugh reports in his USAToday "Today in the Sky" blog, "You may want to hurry to the baggage carousel the next time you fly to Atlanta. That's because 'baggage theft has been a problem at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in recent years,' The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (free registration) reports. The paper says eight people have been arrested between mid-May and the end of June for stealing fliers' luggage from the baggage-claim area.
You may remember that in the good old days, airlines had security people comparing luggage tags with baggage checks. Where'd they all go? Well, someone has to pay those security people, right? And maybe the airlines don't feel like doing that anymore.
So ship your luggage instead, or be the first out the door when your plane lands and sprint to the baggage claim area.
You might want to think about travel insurance (but maybe not sold by your airline).
Also read: Larceny in the Air
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