The ultimate (well, very cool) flexible travel date airfare search chart
Posted by
George on Thursday, July 24, 2008 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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By S. Joe on
Friday, July 25, 2008 at 9:05 AM
excellent, when will this be ready?
By bwilly on
Friday, July 25, 2008 at 12:29 PM
Great info as always!
By GBadger on
Friday, July 25, 2008 at 1:33 PM
One correction: ITA does allow for "Alternate Airports", as you can specify the mileage range that you want your search to cover from your central airport.
By GBadger on
Friday, July 25, 2008 at 1:36 PM
Sorry!!
Comment withdrawn, as I noticed that the "Alternate Airports" is probably only for the flex search tools being discussed here (and not for all of the tools on the site).
ITA does NOT have flex search for 30-day searches.
By GBadger on
Friday, July 25, 2008 at 1:40 PM
But, you can use the ITA routing language (see the help section) to suggest your own alternate cities.
Something like:
FROM: BOS;PVD;MHT
TO: ORD
would search from all of the From airports for the cheapest airfare available.
Sorry for the multiple posts, but there's not "Edit" feature!
By Zeke on
Friday, July 25, 2008 at 8:46 PM
Zuji.com (Travelocity spawn) still works 330 days flexible world-wide if you tell it you are searching from Hong Kong. Of course you have to do currency conversions to figure out exactly WHAT the cheapest fare is in your own currency but 2870 HKD is always going to be cheaper than 4355 HKD no matter how you look at it... :)
By JB on
Saturday, July 26, 2008 at 2:40 AM
This chart doesn't appear to work in FireFox (but does in IE)...
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