How to Find Lowest Online Airfares
It’s a maze of online booking sites out there. How can you be sure you’re paying the best price available for your ticket? Here’s where to turn to be sure you’re getting the absolute best airfare whenever you fly.
Instructions
- Begin Your Search at Booking Sites With Metasearch Capability – These sites search multiple airline ticket sites at once and deliver the results back to you in chart form for easy comparison. Here are the most popular metasearch sites: Kayak, Fare Chase, Qixo, Mobissimo and Side Step.
Kayak offers unique date fine tuning, traveling times and the number of stops at the beginning of your search. It also offers a chart feature that let’s you see if the fares presented that day are historically high or low. Orbitz offers great after-purchase service. - Search the Low Cost Airlines and Auction Sites – Many of these airlines do not allow their fares to appear on other booking sites, so you must go directly to them: Southwest, Spirit Airways, Midwest Express, and Frontier Airlines for airlines, and Priceline and Hotwire for auction sites. If you are looking for low cost airlines flying within Europe, give Dohop a try.
- Enter Your Trip in a Fare Tracking System – Kayak provides a link right on their home page for this service. The Orbitz tracking service has also provided great success. Here’s how it works. Enter the cities you are traveling between and the ticket price you wish to pay (or have just paid). You will then be notified whenever airline prices match or drop below that fare.
Tips and Warnings
- If the lowest fare is offered at an airline’s web site, always click over and purchase it there. It’s always better to have a ticket issued by the airline you’re flying with in case of delays or cancellation.
- When comparing results be careful to look for changes in airports (some sites automatically return results for airports close to the one you have requested). You may find the outbound flight using one airport and then return using another.
- Stay clear of tickets offered on ‘multiple carriers’ unless you’ll be traveling with carry on luggage only. Then you’ll need to make sure you park in a central spot as you may return to a different terminal than you left from.
