Are there any other websites I should be subscribed to?

[MamaParrotHead]

I'm watching airfare like a hawk, I know it's early, but I've been watching airfares for the week we will be cruising for over a year, and it seems to me they dipped significantly in early March. Anyway, I'm subscribed to kayak.com and airfarewatchdog.com. My mom keeps telling me that she's getting emails from travelocity.com about these "super" fares (whose dates coincide with mine) but when she goes to the website, they're gone.

 

Does anyone have a trick to catching these fares, which seem to be in limited supply, at this time?

[Globaliser]

I'm not sure, but I think that expertflyer.com has a fare alerting function. It's only $10/month to subscribe with no minimum period (IIRC), and you get lots of useful functionality.

[parody]

If you have your eye on a specific flight(s), I would input that information into yapta.com and let them do the monitoring for you. They will check fares multiple times a day and send you an email if your fare goes below some level that you pre-specify.

 

If you just want to examine good airfares in general, you could go to webflyer.com and check out what may be of interest. You could also sign up for the smarter travel newsletter which will send you an email for specials from airports that you specify or actively check out their deal page. Then there is the Yahoo travel page where you replace "bwi" with your own airport code. (Sorry, I could never find the root page for this.)

[nho9504]

Farecompare.com

 

you can put in alert based on your criteria. The site also gives you a historical data to identify which range of the fares is considered good, excellent, etc based on past history of that route.

[pcur]

I check my own airfares, because some of these tracking sites don't give you the best schedules.

 

I was hunting for a fare for my sister this morning. I used bestfares, expedia, orbitz, mobissimo, ita, and kayak to begin with. Then, I go directly to the arline web site to get more flexible schedule choices, and sometimes cheaper. Usually, when one of the sites above has a price, the others are usually very close. You don't have to check them all.

 

This morning I found her a fare from BWI into our Central California airport, which is 2 hours from LAX, so it's usually more expensive. I found the fare on ita, but I bought it on United, 1 stop each way, for $350 total.

[MamaParrotHead]

My first instinct is to want to get this booked as soon as the airfare hits my "magic number" (I'd like to not pay more than *around* $200 a piece for ORD-MIA or ORD-FLL, or MLI-MIA, MLI-FLL).

 

I've been tracking this particular week (11/28/09-12/06/09) all of last year (we've been booked for almost a year now, LOL) and I'm wondering if the fares I have recorded from last year will necessarily repeat themselves.

 

I see a decent dip in prices in early March and another mid-June. I know it's WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY far out, but I'd really prefer to have everything booked and PAID FOR ASAP in this darn economy.

 

Does anyone think that gas prices will spike again, and cause airfares to rise again, this year? I had budgeted for around $400 per person (times four of us), so shaving $800 off of our airfare would be a REALLY good thing.

[parody]

I check my own airfares, because some of these tracking sites don't give you the best schedules.

 

Well, this is certainly true for all sites except yapta.com where one tracks the EXACT flight that one is interested in. To my knowledge, this is the only site that will do this. BTW, in examining airfare options, is it the case that you also check southwest.com or is that not an option?

[MamaParrotHead]

I did check out Southwest, but found it odd that they only book 6 months out.

[6rugrats]

I did check out Southwest, but found it odd that they only book 6 months out.

 

The reason for this has been discussed many times on this board.

 

Here's one thread:

 

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=867974&highlight=southwest+schedule

[MamaParrotHead]

Thanks. Interesting reading, though it didn't really occur to me to wonder about it, I just figured that that was the way they did business and they must have their reasons.

[pcur]

Well, this is certainly true for all sites except yapta.com where one tracks the EXACT flight that one is interested in. To my knowledge, this is the only site that will do this. BTW, in examining airfare options, is it the case that you also check southwest.com or is that not an option?

 

Yes, I always check SW first if they fly to the airports I'm interested in. We have a SW Visa and many of our flights to family and cruise ports are with SW and free flights with them.

 

OP: if they service your local airport, you might want to think about getting a SW Visa, because you get 8 free credits when you sign up, and you need 16 for a free roundtrip. We use ours for EVERYTHING we can.

 

Tracking the exact flight won't work for me, because I'm looking for price first, then the schedule. What I've found is many of these sites will give you a good price quote, but not all the flights. I'd rather pick my own, and maybe pay $20 more one way to get a good flight time. I use the above mentioned sites to get an idea of what the price range is, and then zero in on the airline / other sites for the price/schedule combination.