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If you liked my guide to
Cheap Airfare, you might like some of my other
sites:
Battery
Guide
Which battery is best? We cover
rechargeable and alkaline batteries to show you what's hot,
what's not, and the best way to charge them. (visit
now)
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A
d v e r t i s e m e n t
Travel
Accessories
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Plush Sleep Mask
Pillowy soft velour and cushioned
padding block light and soothe tired eyes.
Adjustable elastic straps keep mask in
place. Hand washable with mild soap and
water.
$9.00
Chiropractic Neck
Pillow
Arrive refreshed with this patented deluxe
neck rest. Designed by a chiropractor to
provide extra, comfortable support for
your upper neck and head. Helps avoid
tired, cramped neck muscles at home or
away.
$9.00
Noise
Cancellation Stereo Headphones
Most noise-cancelling headphones that
cost less than $100 reduce background
noise by only 10dB. But these fine
headphones reduce noise by 18dB and cost
only $59. In addition, the NoiseBuster is
lightweight, well-built and foldable for
easy packing and storage.
$59.00
No Jet Lag
Homeopathic remedy to counter jet-lag.
Since 1990, thousands of long-distance
travelers have depended on No
Jet-Lag™ to help them feel fresh on
arrival after flying. The manufacturer,
Miers Laboratories of Wellington, New
Zealand, has been listed with the FDA
since 1992. No Jet-Lag is listed by the
FDA for over-the-counter sale in the U.S.,
and has passed Olympic standards tests as
being free from any traces of banned
drugs.
$11.00
Visit
TravelProducts.com for more
travel accessories.
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Airfare
Search Engines Compared
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Includes Southwest
Airlines
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Searches for flexible
dates (i.e.,
doesn't make you put in specific
dates)
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Shows total travel time
when there's a layover
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Finds cheap fares for
one-way travel
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Handles multi-city
trips
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Searches for alternate
airports w/cheaper fares
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Travelocity
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Click "More Search
Options"
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Searches for flexible dates easily
(finds the best fare available and
then tells you what dates you can
fly to get that fare). Click on "flexible
dates" to access this feature.
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Sidestep
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More fares than anyone, since it
includes Orbitz! Use
this unless your dates are flexible or
you're traveling between more than two
cities.
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Orbitz
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More features than anyone: Flexible
date finder, multi-city search, total time
for multi-leg trip, shows prices by
airline *and* number of stops, lets you
request special meals, and lets you pick
the exact seat on the plane(!).
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Qixo
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$10 fee for each fare booked. No
advantage that I can see over the three
better engines I list above.
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Hotwire
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Requires log-in before showing
fares; requires purchase before showing
airline or flight times. Sometimes good
for last-minute fares that the other sites
don't show.
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Southwest
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An individual airline, not a search
engine, but we're listing them separately
because the search engines above don't
include their flights, and because their
fares are often cheaper than what you can
find in those engines.
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Best
Fares
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GOOD: Like
Travelocity, they show the best fares
without your having to put in specific
dates. And they show fares for Southwest,
while Travelocity doesn't.
BAD: Site is
incredibly slow, access to very best fares
requires $60 membership fee whose price is
hidden behind several screens. Doesn't
provide one-way fares.
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Travelocity
is our favorite because it easily searches for
flexible dates. (It finds the cheapest possible
fare between two cities, and then tells you
what days you can fly to get that fare -- saving
you money if your travel dates are flexible.) In
fact, Travelocity pioneered this feature. Of
course, if you must travel on specific dates then
Travelocity will still find the best fare it can
for those dates. Unfortunately, Travelocity doesn't
include flights on Southwest Airlines even though
Southwest is the low-price leader in certain
markets. A similar site is Best
Fares, which does include Southwest flights,
but Best Fares is very slow and access to the very
best fares requires a $60 membership fee.
SideStep
has more fares than anyone -- they even search
Orbitz for you! They're the best to use if your
dates are fixed and you're not flying between more
than two cities, because they don't offer flexible
dates or multi-city fares. (For flexible dates and
multi-city trips use Travelocity.)
Also, SideStep doesn't check fares at Southwest, so
do check Southwest manually to see if they can beat
whatever you find on SideStep.
Orbitz.
Orbitz is a joint effort by five major airlines
and shows airfares from a whopping 450 airlines,
though SideStep took a lot of that wind out of
Orbitz' sails by including Orbitz' results in its
own results. But Orbitz offers lots of things that
SideStep doesn't, like flexible dates and
multi-city trips. Orbitz also conveniently shows
groups the results by both the airline and the
number of stops in the same table, and it shows you
the total duration of a multi-leg trip --
something no other engine does (at the time of this
writing). Orbitz also lets you specify special meal
preferences and even lets you pick which seat on
the aircraft you want(!). Downsides: Like most
other engines they don't list fares from Southwest
Airlines. Also, according to a reader, they don't
accept credit cards from outside the U.S. Orbitz'
flexible-date feature isn't quite as easy to use as
Travelocity's. If it were then Orbitz would be our
#1 choice for flexible dates. We still use Orbitz
as a backup to see if it beats whatever fare we
found on Travelocity.
Qixo
searches several sites for you (Travelocity, Cheap
Tickets, individual airlines, etc.) so you don't
have to visit each. This was a great idea until it
was pretty much rendered obsolete by Orbitz,
which is run by the airlines themselves. These days
you're hard pressed to get a better deal with Qixo
than with Orbitz, and Orbitz is faster, easier, and
has more features to boot. Another downside of Qixo
is that they don't have a phone number for customer
service -- you have to contact them through email
or the "live chat" feature on their website. Qixo
used to have the distinction of being the only
engine that included flights from Southwest
Airlines, but alas, they don't include Southwest
any more. Qixo was our favorite long ago (circa
2001), but the competition has now surpassed
them.
Hotwire.
When there are unsold seats on a flight
airlines will offer them at a substantial discount
at the last minute (a couple of days to a week
before the flight leaves). You have to be flexible
with your itinerary, but if that's you, you can
score amazing cheap airfare this way. Most search
engines don't have access to these special,
suddenly-discounted flights, but Hotwire does, so
Hotwire can often find you a much better deal than
the others. (We got Texas to California RT airfare
at the last minute for only $250 with only one
connection; this route was being sold for at least
$600 everywhere else, including Travelocity. We
also got Baton Rouge to Miami one-way for just $152
with only four days' advance purchase.) One catch:
You pick the days you want to travel, but Hotwire
picks the flight times for you, and you can't see
them until AFTER you've purchased your ticket. Same
deal on the number of connections -- there could be
a lot.
Kayak
is nice by assuming you want to search
nearby airports (without making you go to a
separate screen to select that option), and giving
you a nice list of the prices for each airport it
finds (rather than dumping all the results
together). It's kind of slow, but not only is the
nearby-searching feature nice, it also found our
sample fare for $12 cheaper than Orbitz.
There are lots of other websites, but we
don't list them all because we're focusing on
quality, not quantity. If you know of a
really good site that we don't list here
feel free to let us know about it, but please make
sure you're able to tell us why it's better than at
least one of the sites we already list.
Regardless of which site you use, make sure you
check out our Tips
for getting cheapest airfares.
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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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More
features than anybody
Flexible dates, multi-city trips, shows total
duration for multi-leg trip, lets you specify
special meals, and lets you pick the exact seat on
the plane(!). What more do you want? Recommended by
Michael Bluejay.
Orbitz.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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