Air Travel
From DCWiki
Contents |
Finding the best deal on a plane ticket
- I personally never use Priceline, just because my available time is a bit constrained. Maybe it's a great deal, I have no clue.
- First thing I do is check Farecast. Awesome site, shows price trends for airline tickets on the days you're flying, and based on that, recommends whether you should buy now or wait. They even have some sort of price guarantee, but I've never used it.
- Nowadays I only bother checking Farechase and Southwest.com, the latter only because they stubbornly refuse to let any meta-sites include their ticket prices. I used to check another site that had a grid that showed ticket prices for the day before and after your selected date, to see if that's cheaper, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was, and I'm too lazy to look it up.
- Other airline search engines (domestic):
- Other airline search engines (international):
- Other booking agencies
Choosing your seat
I also recommend SeatGuru when selecting your seats. Shows you which seats are good/bad for each type of plane.
How to pay
I'm against frequent flyer credit cards, not that they're inherently bad, it's just I don't fly enough with a single airline to justify their use. I use the following cards to pay for flights:
- Discover - Every three months they have a special cashback category where you get an automatic 5% back. Until March 2007, it's travel, so you get 5% back on hotels, plane tickets, car rentals, etc. Pretty good deal.
- American Express Costco Cash Rebate Card - if you're a Costco member, it's free, and you get 2% off on all travel charges. Another good deal.
Commments
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I signed up for one of the rewards credit cards. Even though the interest rate is a little higher, I benefit because I earn points no matter which airline I buy tickets with. Also I can redeem the points I earn to buy a ticket with any airline. Plus, if I buy airline tickets for my friends and family I also earn points.
