How to Find Great Deals on Airfare

The MintLife blog suggests that there's a "new" way to find the best airfare deals. A summary of their suggestions:

Cochran’s advice is to sign up for the free email alerts from AirfareWatchdog.com and all airlines that fly out of your home airport: this way you’ll know when tickets go on sale and can even create your vacation’s itinerary around the most affordable airfare routes.

Next, swing by Bing Travel and Momondo.com: those websites try to predict airfares based on historical data.

Finally, these days your search for deals doesn’t end with the ticket purchase. If the price of your flight falls any time after that, you can get some of your money back thanks to new websites that alert you to those changes.

Most of my travel is done for business trips and while I look for a "good deal" when I travel for my company, I don't spend several days watching various sites, trying to save my last dollar, etc. In addition, the times of the flights (departure and arrival) are usually most important when booking corporate travel and price is a secondary concern. And we don't do much flying for personal trips.

All of this adds up to the fact that I don't have much experience in buying/saving on airfare. So I'm counting on you more-seasoned airfare savers to tell me if this is a good system or not -- and if not, what is a better option. I'm looking to put a bit of effort into finding great air deals on some future trips our family would like to take. ;-)

Comments

[LotharBot]

There's also hipmunk.com -- "better flight search" by far. It becomes a lot easier to find good deals when you can actually see all of the deals at once instead of having to jump between 18 different websites.

[May]

I saw the original post and was already using Airfarewatchdog.com. I think getting alerts from them and your local airport is pretty good advice. If you subscribe to different threads by Airfarewatchdog and you're really frugal and adventurous, you can even learn about an amazing deal and plan your vacation that way to save a ton of money. I saw $600 tickets from Boston to Beijing recently and saw $250 tickets from multiple cities to Belize.

[Melissa Tosetti]

Airlines tend to change their pricing on Tuesdays. It's a good day to watch for price reductions.