Home > Still Traveling > Archives > 2008 > September > 24 > Entry
DEL.ICIO.USWhere do you go to find the best travel deals?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Higher airline fees, exorbitant gas costs and closed fuel pumps can make it feel like the deck is stacked against Atlanta travelers who want to get out of town right now. For many, stretching travel dollars has become increasingly more important. So where do you go to get the best travel deals?
Most people, it seems, hit the Internet in one way or another. Long gone are the days we called our travel agents to book a trip. If today’s traveler has a question about a destination, we’re more likely to check out frommers.com or lonelyplanet.com to get the answer instantly. Need a hotel reservation? It’s a click away at hotels.com. Just want advice from fellow travelers? Type in www.tripadvisor.com. And the list of travel-related sites goes on and on and on.
So, it seems natural that the Internet’s the place to start when you want to “get your travel on” for less. Booking sites like orbitz.com and expedia.com allow you to compare flights, hotels, rental cars, etc. Priceline.com goes a step further to let you bid for your own price. Hotwire’s experts post deals on flights, condos, cruises, hotels and cars as they find them on their Travel Ticker (www.travel-ticker.com). Smartertravel.com and budgettravel.com offer similar deals. (Please don’t forget ajc.com’s Travel Deals!)
Even airlines - mostly European, like Lufthansa and KLM — are beginning to go beyond booking tickets on the Internet to full-on Facebook-type social networking sites for their customers. While this makes me think of the ill-fated Dunder-Mifflin social networking site on The Office, these airlines are offering reduced fares and special packages for their online users - so it might just work.
When all else fails, there’s always frequent flier miles. I know… redeeming awards tickets can often be about as fun as entering the lower circles of Dante’s inferno. (It takes more miles to get a free ticket that you can’t use to go where you want, when you want.) Now, Delta allows its American Express Skymiles customers to trade in some of the miles for reduced ticket fares.
How do you support your travel habit? What are some of the best deals you have seen lately? Which of these sites do you use most often? Where do you find the biggest and best savings? Would you use an airline-sponsored social network if you could get cheaper tickets? Would you use Skymiles to pay part of your ticket price?
• Cut spending with the AJC’s Your Money page
Comments
By Love A Deal
September 24, 2008 9:31 AM | Link to this
Travelzoo.com is a wonderful site to see what the hand picked deals are out there. They have a top 20 deals and many others on the site. They also send you emails detailing hot deals and a weekly top 20 newsletter. When booking flights, I use expedia to check rates, but use the airline’s website to book the fare to avoid fees. For hotels, I use hotwire to buy or use as a comp. I then to go priceline and make a bid, as their price can be somewhat lower than hotwire. The same for car rentals. You pay upfront, but if you know you are going, and if the rate is worth the prepay, go for it. For hotels, I sometimes look closer to the travel date as the price can sometimes be lower. Happy trails!
By Stewie
September 24, 2008 10:13 AM | Link to this
We’ve had good luck using Priceline for hotel rates, frequently getting rooms at 4-star hotels for 50-60% of the regular rates.
AirTran has consistently had the lowest fares for the locations and times when we’ve needed/wanted to travel.
I found good car rental rates using CarRental.com, which I believe is owned by Expedia. Something about that site made me a little nervous, though, so after finding the rate I went to the Enterprise site and got the lowest rate from them.
I have to say, the deals presented by the regular AJC travel writer typically are nothing of the sort…they range from okay to horrible, IMHO.
By CBL
September 24, 2008 1:24 PM | Link to this
The best deals are the ones that go unadvertised on any travel website or blog and are found using Kayak.com.
I flew roundtrip to Munich, Germany from Charlotte, NC on Lufthansa for $260 roundtrip (taxes & fees included) two years ago. Bought the tickets on Orbitz and the deal was gone after about 48 hours. Nobody ever reported it. To get the best deals, go out of season, fly mid-week, and be flexible with dates. Most of the time you will find a good deal, but sometimes you just find one that you can’t pass up and buy into it immediately and figure out why you’re going later. It’s also important to do the research yourself. By the time Clark Howard reports on it, it’s either going to expire in a matter of hours or is already sold out.