 The Discounted Air Fare
The old trick of just turning up at an airport as an opportunist in an attempt to get cheap air fare deals was fine for lone travellers with flexible schedules, but not really practical for couples and families. There’s a difference between budget carriers who offer air travel at heavily reduced prices, and cheap deals cheap, cheap because they are with unknown, unreliable, and poorly regulated airlines. Discounted seats on good airlines in not the same as cheap seats on some no name carrier from nowhere! In fact, if you don’t check carefully you could be in for a flight from hell. I took the cheapest route back from KL in Malaysia to London's Heathrow airport and here's what I experienced!
I hunted for ages to find the best cheap air fare deals, and cheap I got, but 'best' I did not! All in all, this cheap airticket gave me a saving to the equivalent to £140 (British pounds sterling). All I can say is that this cheap plane fare made me vow to myself that I would never skimp on air travel again if I could help it. Shop for low international airfares and expect low standards.
We stopped in Calcutta, India and had to get off the plane and wait in a hot sticky room without as much as a drop of water and a fan between us. That was for almost 2 hours. We had to land and get off the plane again at Abu Dhabi for 2 hours and then Romania for 4 hours more where there was a change of planes. After arriving at London's Heathrow (eventually), it was exhausting to find that all the luggage had gone missing en route.
That cheap airticket gave me a grand saving of £140 sterling on a long haul flight. In hindsight, which is always a wonderful thing, discounted seats with third rate airlines are not worth all the stress or the inconvenience, especially if you have the money and are just penny pinching for the sake of it. In future, the best way to get cheap air fare deals on long haul flight, is simply to book as far in advance as you can, because the less seats they have remaining, the higher the price goes.
Don't be too put off by the above as there really are some fantastic low air fares to be had on both long and short haul flight. All I'm saying is check the routes, times and anticipated delays if you want a reasonably hassle free trip with the cheapest air fare available. No matter where you are going, from Alaska to Zimbabwe, and anywhere in between, chances are that you can benefit from cheap air fare deals in 2009 just like any other year previous, but booking early is the key.
For a while, especially post 911, you could basically take cheap air fare for granted. Everyone was worried about security and terrorism, no one wanted to fly, and so the airlines had awesome air fare deals all over the place – they were practically begging people to fly, and that is no joke. There were literally cheap air fares to just about anywhere in a bid to get folks back onto the planes.
Now, with a bloated war chest and a shrinking economy, getting good air fare deals is more important than ever. No one can afford to pay the standard price of tickets, and so internet sites which offer air fare deals such as Expedia and Kayak, have been doing booming business. In reality, however, these sites are not enough alone to get you the best air fare deals. Many of them mark up their prices, actually. They will get you a cheaper rate, it is true, but it will still be 10, 20, sometimes as much as 50 dollars more than if you would buy from the actual airline. Of course, this is not always true, but if you are interested in getting the best air fare deals, you must remember to not only check the main commercial sites which compare airline prices, but the airlines directly.
This is not quite as much of a pain in the neck as it might sound. Usually, you do not have to check all of the airlines for air fare deals. For example, I live in Oakland, California, and frequently travel to Portland, Oregon, to visit my girlfriend. After checking the web for air fare deals, I discovered that there are only two airlines which really give competitive rates on this particular route: Southwest Airlines, and Alaska Airlines. This means that I do not have to routinely check, say, United Air, or Northwest to make sure that I am getting the best air fare deals on flights to Portland. I simply check one or two of the comparison engines, and then go to those two airlines themselves. Really, I have to go to as few as three or four sites to get the best air fare deals.
Digging out the cheapest air fares is hardly rocket science, it just requires a little forward planning for those that are able to do it. The earlier you book, the cheaper the seats. It's a simple as that. And if you can book both early and off-peak, those air fare deals get cheaper still. Last minute air fare deals are still a good way to find bargains, but if there is more than one of you, then the chances of getting on the same flight at the same time, and seats that are together, get's slimmer as the numbers go up. This type of air travel is far better suited to the lone passenger with time on their hands. |
