Air

the Big Picture

Test this anew. Air travel is incredibly competitive and dynamic. New online booking sites appear and old ones improve their services. If you have a battle-tested technique, please feel free to share with our community in the Comments. If some of our information has become outdated (it can happen overnight!), we’re grateful for the heads up. And this is flagged as in need of update in one year.

And test this anew too. Taking a flight used to be a pleasurable adventure… or is that just a gilded memory of a mythical Golden Age of Flying? There were almost no security checks, baggage allowances were generous, onboard seating was spacious, the food was still bad, but the drinks kept on coming, flight attendants (all “stewardesses” back then) seemed to be more friendly. Yet there was more paperwork involved in ticketing and fares were expensive compared to now. More booking errors were made. Aircraft were not as well equipped and their ranges were shorter. There were more delays and cancellations due to weather and mechanical problems. More planes crashed.

Now you can go online and get a cheap ticket to almost anywhere in the world. In 24 hours you can be on the other side of the planet. But security screening can cause long bottlenecks,

• Pre-booked itinerary
  • True independent travelers don’t commit to a series of pre-booked flights
    • Suppose you just love Goa and don’t want to take that Mumbai to Cairo flight you have on your RTW ticket
    • You can change the date, but not the destination
    • But there’s this event in Bali that you just have to go to or you’ve met someone you want to continue with who isn’t on your pre-booked schedule

Air is the cheapest and often the only way to travel long distances in the time you have available. Although purists justly deride the sterile bubble of air travel when compared to making the same journey by land and sea, most travelers don’t have the time to cross the Pacific on a ship or risk a land trip over every segment of the Cape-to-Cairo route. Like it or not, most of us will begin and end a journey with a flight. Many of us will also take a regional or domestic flight between destinations as well.

Unfortunately, airlines make it difficult to choose a ticket with the best combination of routing, departure and arrival times, included services and restrictions to match your needs… all at a nice price.

There’s a short menu of conditions and restrictions attached to any fare. If you require any flexibility at all (routing, layovers, date changes), you need to know whether that is possible with the ticket, whether you can make a change for an acceptable cost or whether you need a different class of ticket.

You could rely on a storefront travel agent to help you, but most such travel agents aren’t familiar with much beyond the most traveled routes and vacation packages. You won’t get the cheapest ticket from them either.

Online travel agents (OTAs), such as Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Orbitz and many many others, are more competitive, but they treat an airline ticket like a bus ticket — if you need to know whether you can stopover in London on the way through, an online booking won’t tell you up front. If your connecting flights are at all complicated, your quoted ticket price on an OTA can bloat to a huge figure.

If your flight really is as simple as an A-to-B bus ticket, lucky you. Otherwise, you’ll have to understand what your tickets entitle you to — and what they don’t. You’ll have to shop around not just the OTAs, but the low-cost airlines that the OTA’s don’t quote. For many routes, you will never find the cheapest flight on an OTA.

At some point, the extra work tracking down the perfect flight might not seem worth small additional savings. But if you don’t do your homework up front, you could pay several times the cost of a competing ticket. That’s money that could have lengthened your trip or paid for a cool experience.

So, let’s start this game of whack-a-mole and try to find the best ticket for the money.