Travel

As you may already know by now, I am a self-confessed travel junkie.  I scrimp and save and scrimp so more just so I can get travelin .

Back in the day, before the onset of this thing called the internet , people would go to their travel agent for their flight tickets.  These days, people are using the internet much more to book their travel.  There are a few ways in which your flight can be booked on the internet:

Sites such as Travelocity , Orbitz. and Expedia make it easy to look for flights and search for the best connections and deals.  These guys are the big boys of online booking engines.  They add on a small booking fee (kind of like an online travel agent-bot) for their services.

The thing about Travelocity, Orbitz, and Expedia is that they are owned by travel agents or even by airlines.  For example, Orbitz is owned by American, Continental, Delta, Northwest and United Airlines.  Which means that you might not get a complete aggregation of the airlines that are running that flight.

That being said, I find that I almost always end up using Orbitz for any packages or flights within North America because the often have promo codes that work.  These promo codes help me save anywhere from $50 to $125 for flight and hotel packages.  Sites that have reliable promo codes for Travelocity, Orbitz, and Expedia are:

I love Kayak.com .  They even have an iPhone/ iTouch App from Kayak.com.  Kayak aggregates flight data and compiles it for you, then they let you link to the site offering the cheap flight.  For example, they may even link to Expedia or Cathay Pacific, depending on where it has found the cheaper flight.  The good thing is that Kayak doesn t charge a fee.  They count on affiliate hotel offerings and advertising instead.  Kayak lets you search for open jaw flights (multi-stop itineraries).The drawback is that Kayak usually doesn t include the budget airlines, like WestJet (for Canada) and Southwest Airlines, Jetblue, or Allegiant Air (for US).  I find that Kayak is often quite good for international flights I ran a search and went to two different in-person travel agencies and they couldn t beat the price I found on Kayak.

Other notable Aggregators are:

• Vayama (based in Nevada- it has a cool interactive map that shows where you re traveling to)
• Sky Scanner (compiles 600 airlines, based out of Edinborough and Poland)
• Momondo (started in 2006 and based in Denmark)
• Jet Abroad (based out of Sydney, Australia- but can convert AUD into currency of choice- this compiler has 400 airlines and has a lot of smaller budget Asian airlines that you wouldn t find on Kayak)

HUGE TIP ALERT: Make sure that when you re browsing the same flight path multiple times throughout multiple days, that you DELETE your cookies. Otherwise, you ll find that the flight you re looking at is more expensive (about $50-$100 more).  The compiler can see that you re interested in that flight and raises the price. You ll find that after you reset and delete your cookies, the price goes back to normal and you can breathe a sigh of relief.

Another way to save some money is to go directly to the airlines (if you re feeling ambitious), especially if your flight request is pretty simple and the flight path doesn t look like you re skipping pebbles on the globe or anything.  Sometimes you can find deals directly on the airlines website, cheaper than posted on Kayak or the online booking engines.  Oftentimes, the airlines save their best deals for their own website.

Every Wednesday, I get an email of the hottest last minute deals available (flights, flight packages, hotel stays etc.) from:

• Travel Zoo They send the Top 20 Deals every Wednesday (you can pick your region and they ll send you deals for your city)
• Travel Alerts (only for Canada)

I also sign up for airlines email notifications, I can be the first to know if there is a  West Jet sale or Air Canada seat sale (they often run their seat sales at the same time, coincidentally enough =P )

I like to do my research online and double check at a travel agent.  I went to Flight Centre and found that they weren t really the cheapest, though they claim to beat any advertisers price.  Travel Cuts is a good bet if you are a student or a young adult.  Sometimes travel agents have access to really really cheap fares, that you know, only travel agents know about.  I had a colleague who scored a return trip to Japan from Vancouver for $700 including taxes from her travel agent.

The trick is to use a multi-pronged attack with all the methods mentioned above.  Do your research, check around, to make sure you absolutely have the best deal (though don t wait too late because flight prices tend to go up as you get closer to the date).

Readers, do you have any tips not mentioned above on how to save money on airfare?  What s your fave method?