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 Cheapest airfare for international flights
For exotic locations, don't
count on the Internet
Search engines like Kayak are great for finding flights
within the U.S., but sometimes they're not so good for flights
that start or end in places like Asia, India, or Africa. That's
because not all foreign airlines make their fares available to the
search engines, and even those which do sometimes don't list their best
fares. International engines like Momondo and Mobissimo sometimes do better, but even they
sometimes miss fares offered by certain airlines.
So what do you do? First off, try a travel agent.
If you've gotten in the habit of buying airfare online, you've probably gotten into
the mindset that travel agents can't do better than what you can find
on the net by yourself. Well, that goes out the window as soon as you're
talking international fares. Case in point: Once the best fare I
could get for Japan to India (Osaka to Delhi) from Kayak, Orbitz, etc.
was $1641. I walked across the street to a travel agent in Osaka
and got a price of $1108 -- a whopping $538 savings. (And yes,
the budget price included taxes and all applicable fees.)
I had a similar experience in India, trying to get a
flight to Hong Kong. I spent hours on the net and I think
the best I could come up with was around $1200. I mentioned my problem
to the hotel staff, and they said they were sure they could arrange a
ticket for me. I asked them to go ahead, and sure enough, they did, for
around $566 -- less than half price! (I tipped appropriately.)
The point is, you just can't expect all international flights to show
up in the search engines.
If you go this route you need to make sure that you're
not being scammed by buying a fake ticket, and that's especially true
in India. But as long as you work with staff at a hotel you
should be okay, because if they scammed you then you could tell the
police exactly who they were, so they're not likely to do so.
Just don't buy from someone who doesn't have a permanent business
location.
(Incidentally, those tickets I just mentioned were all
before I stopped flying, because flying
causes climate change. Now I travel by train and cargo
ship, and I bought carbon
offsets for the travel I already took.)
Okay, here's the last tip on travel to or from exotic
locations: Find the airlines that serve the country you're flying
to or from. For example, a Google search turned up this list of airlines
flying to India (sorted by which countries/areas they fly from).
You can then check the airlines' websites or call them to get fares,
which will often be substantially cheaper than what you can find in the
search engines.
Finally, our general tips for getting cheap airfare apply to international fares as well. For example, round-trips are often cheaper than one-ways for some inexplicable reason, so if
you're planning an around-the-world trip full
of one-ways, you might save by buying roundtrip tickets and then not
using the return trip. Also, remember that when you insist on
flying on certain days you'll usually pay more, so if your schedule is
flexible,pick your travel destination first, and then
find the cheapest travel dates for that destination. If you start
your research with hard-wired dates in hand, you're unilkely to get the
best deal.
U.S. to Bermuda, Cancun, etc.
USA3000 offers service between
select U.S. cities and Bermuda, Cancun, La Romana, Puerto Plata, and
Punta Cana. In Sept. 2004 we checked and found a roundtrip fare between
Baltimore and Bermuda for $160 (!), while the best Orbitz could find
was closer to $400.
Other
international sites
Other sites we found which have
good international fares are:
- U.S. to/from Canada: Air Canada
- Canada to everywhere: Sears Travel
- Australia to Australia: Fare Hunter
- Other international, especially Europe: Mobissimo & Momondo.
- Momondo's flexible dates feature is awesome. It gives
you a GRAPH showing the price for every single day in any month you
choose. Sweet! Unfortunately, this feature doesn't always work, though.
Tip
for flying into Europe
Kelly Fine writes: "We found
that it was much cheaper to fly to London on one airline and fly from
London to the Continent on another airline. This seemed to be true no
matter what city in Europe we wanted to go to. And it was impossible to
find a cheap flight from anywhere to Bratislava, so we found a flight
to Vienna, which is only a little over an hour by bus from Bratislava.
Flying into central and eastern Europe is much more expensive than
flying to western Europe."
Courier travel: A
thing of the past
For years I used to mention the great deals you
could get as a courier, by
carrying documents or packages in exchange for a deeply discounted
fare. But over the years I had to slowly remove the courier
websites from my list one at a time as they went out of business, and
now there are
pretty much none left. Well, there might be a couple, but they
can't really save you any money.
So what happened?
- The Internet now lets companies send documents quickly
and cheaply, so fewer couriers are needed.
- Post 9/11 regulations make it harder to transport items
that aren't actually yours.
- The fact that airlines now charge for checked baggage
makes courier travel a worse deal (both for the courier company as well
as for the traveler).
- Travelers now have easy access to discounted fares
through the Internet, so they can already save a lot compared to what
they might have had to pay in the past.
Here's a good article from MSNBC which explains the
change. Sorry, the party's over.
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 Thanks
for visiting, and I hope you liked the site.
I'll leave you with a couple of hand-picked
ads.
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Find
which travel days are cheapest
If your travel dates are flexible, just enter
the cities you're flying between and let
Travelocity find which days are cheapest to fly.
Being flexible with your travel dates is our #1 tip
for getting the cheapest airfare.
Travelocity.com
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If you liked my
guide to Cheap Airfare, you might like some of my other sites:
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