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Airfare Prices - Booking A
Bargain |
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Book your airfare How to Easily Monitor Airfare Prices Watch prices shrink with this nifty little service. Courtesy of Etan Horowitz
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Booking A Bargain
Despite Rising Prices, it's still possible to Courtesy of Michelle Higgins, The New York Times |
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1. Enter your email address in the blank field "not a member? Join now!" Fill in the information to create a Yapta account and click to join Yapta. Wait for the confirmation email to arrive, open the message and click on the confirmation link. 2. Once you are signed in to the Yapta site, click on the "get Yapta" tab and download the appropriate version of Yapta. (You can track flights without downloading Yapta by inputting details of each flight you want to track). 3.Once you've downloaded and installed Yapta, go to an airline website to search for a flight. Yapta will automatically detect that you are an airline website, and you'll be asked to "Enable Yapta". Once you've enabled Yapta, a little icon that says "Tag it with Yapta" will appear next to the different flights. Click that button to track a particular flight or flights. 4. Those trips are now saved in
the "My trips" section of your Yapta profile, and you will get an email when
the price of those flights drop. You also can have Yapta email you only
when a flight drops below a certain price. (Yapta does not track the price
of Southwest Airlines).
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Book directly with the airline: Taking a page from the hotel industry, airlines have begun to guarantee equal or better prices to travelers who book with them directly. This helps drive traffic to their sites and save on commission expenses they would otherwise pay to third-party booking sites like Orbitz or Expedia. Moreover, some airlines- including Delta, American, United and Continental- are offering compensations like a $50. or $100 voucher for a future flight if passengers find an airline fare lower than the one they offer on their own sites for that flight.
Sign up for private
price cuts: Not unlike clothing chains that dole out special
"family and friends" discounts to employees and repeat customers, airlines
quietly offer special coupon codes to travelers who sign up for their weekly
newsletters or frequent flier programs. Airfarewatchdog.com, which
monitors such deals and posts the codes on its web site, reports that it has
noticed an increase in deals recently, including new promotion codes in
Alaska Airlines newsletters every few weeks with savings typically of 20
percent. "This happens all the time, as the 'inventory' systems for the airlines decide to start closing out cheap prices on a flight", Rick Seaney, chief executive of Farecompare.com wrote in an e-mail message. On a recent search for flights from Dallas to Frankfort for a July trip, Seaney turned up a round-trip ticket at AmericanAirLines for $1,431. When he searched for multiple tickets, the lowest ticket price jumped to $1,536. Search for flights at alternate airports: Depending on the distance from your home to the airport, using smaller regional airports can sometimes mean savings. For example, a recent search for a flight from Midway Airport in Chicago to Orlando, Fla., turned up a ticket on AirTran Airways for $233 round-trip, for a June weekend getaway. The lowest price for the same trip from O'Hare was $321 on United. Don't wait if you see a deal: "If you see an airfare and it looks good to you, don't shop-buy.", said Rein of Travelworm.com. "It's like wandering around the shopping mall. You can walk next door looking for a deal, and by the time you walk back it might be gone." |
