China Trips - open jaw is often fine

Although the airline ticket market is so fast, furious, and whacky you'll want to check many sources before booking, a few tips I've learned from my China ticket booking:

* Although I was told by a ticketer that generally Hong Kong is the cheapest destination it seemed Shanghai and Beijing (PEK) tickets were in the same price ballpark of 800-1000 from my rural area, and perhaps 100-200 less for round trips from San Francisco.

* Vayama was often the low rate among consolidators, but it was not clear if changes would be more severely penalized through a consolidator so we went directly through United.com. This was $46 more on my $886 ticket, an open jaw from MFR to Hong Kong, then Beijing to MFR. Airfares.com offered the same flights for $840. I'm assuming changes will be much easier directly through United, but not clear if this was worth the extra money.

* Open jaw did not seem to increase the price much if at all.



* Fees and taxes are not reported by all consolidators online, and it seemed there were no "killer consolidators" who offered rates much different from the Airlines for economy classes. I would guess that for first class things become driven by strange forces and your company should shop around carefully to avoid getting gouged. Some of the first class seats were showing at $25,000. I can't imagine what I'd need in terms of comfort to justify that price, even if money was absolutely no object.

Travel Booking Tips from BT Travel

Note: I was not familiar with BTS Travel until tonight and cannot vouch for this as a good company - but they did have some great posted rates to China, and these excellent general discount travel tips:

SATURDAY NIGHT STAY
Try including Saturday night during your stay at the destination.

BOOK EARLY
We sell heavily discounted tickets only. Our seat inventory is very limited on each aircraft. The earlier you book the more chance you have to get the cheapest possible seat.

AVOID WEEKEND TRAVEL
Traveling Monday thru Thursday is generally cheaper than Friday thru Sunday. This applies to departure and return travel. Airlines charge up to $80 more for weekend travel.

THE CHEAPEST ONE WAY FARES
We offer substantially cheaper one way fares than many other major websites. Our one way fare are typically up to 50 percent cheaper than round trip fares.

EXTENDED AIRPORT SEARCH
Our search engine automatically searches for lowest fares using multiple airports within large metropolitan areas. This method is guaranteed to find you the lowest possible fare if you are flexible with the airports.

ATA Fare Sale for NYC and D.C. flights

ATA has some great fares to and from New York La Guardia (LGA) as well as flights to and from Washington D.C. Reagan International (DCA). Check out the ATA website for more details.

I think ATA is one of the carriers you may need to check separately in case the consolidator has not listed them or you have entered days on which they don't fly, when a small adjustment to your plans could save a lot of money on the airline tickets.

YAPTA cheap fare search using "wisdom of crowds"

Yapta is trying to be "Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant", using the collective wisdom of thousands of other Yapta subscribers to find cheap fares. I have not used the service yet but it's a neat idea in that it could harvest information from a large number of travelers and then work to "optimize" their experiences based on all the extra info. Unfortunately many such efforts can get bogged down when it comes to monetizing the enterprise. For example if Yapta knows that your best travel day would be Tuesday with a Saturday layover but the Yapta advertisers want them to book more Friday departures there can be a subtle shift in focus. This is even happening at Google where the shading on advertising is slowly diminishing, blurring the distinction between "organic" and ad results.

But good luck Yapta! If you provide unbiased air travel info from a broad sample of air travelers you could be on your way to success.

Online Travel Top Innovation according to USA Today

USA Today has a fun series on the top 25 things in various categories from business to science to...travel. For the Travel sector, USA Today notes online booking, TSA, and e-tickets as the top three "pivotal changes" in travel.

My feeling is that online travel still has a *lot* of innovative stuff left to take root in the online landscape. As with much of the internet - indeed with many business aspects of the world - the key challenge is *credibility*. We still count on marketing laden, advertisement driven information sources (e.g. the internet) to drive our exploration into products. As people become more comfortable and sophisticated in surfing and companies realize that marketing is no substitute for a quality product, it could usher in a new era of "consumer transparency" where business will compete on the basis of objective quality measures as determined by a well-informed social media audience ranking every aspect of the business.

Yikes - that's not gonna happen anytime soon?!

Cheap Airline Booking Tips revisited

Via Jason Calcanis I just found a very thoughtful article by Nicole over at Mahalo with tips to booking cheap airline tickets.

Unless you have a *lot more* time on your hands than I do I think some of these suggestions are basically overkill (priceline and following prices after you book) but she's making several great key points including how important it is to be flexible and to use comparison tools like Orbitz, Y ahoo FareChase, or Kayak.

Here is Nicole's Cheap Airline Ticket article.

I think doing some diligent comparisons on Kayak over a few weeks will usually get you similar results for Airlines in USA. Overseas is much more complex because consolidators can be much cheaper - seek them out for expensive flights.

There is no magic formula - just keep on trucking and you'll find cheap stuff, though not always online.

Seat Guru provides great airline seat info and diagrams

SeatGuru.com is a simple and clever site that provides seat information for most of the aircraft on almost all the major airlines. Clicking your airline and then the type of plane you'll be on will get you detailed diagrams showing "good" seats and other important information.

Many airlines now allow you to select seats and print boarding passes online, and this is a great way to take care of business before you get to the airports. Preprinted boarding passes often get you to the gate much faster if you have only carry on luggage. When I'm travelling alone I tend to pack light and just lug my luggage around to avoid the hassle and delays of checking my bags. I can then print up my pass and avoid the ticketing lines and head straight for the gate.

With the family this does not seem to be worth the trouble of keeping track of all the bags during flight transfers so we generally print the boarding passes but then check the luggage at the airport.

Airline Ticketing Tips from TheStreet.com

TheStreet has some good tips for saving on your airline tickets.

My simple ones are these:

Use comparison sites, especially Kayak.com. Kayak features Orbitz.com
but you may also want to use the Orbitz matrix feature which allows you to specify flexible dates. Having date flexibility can be a good key to lower fares.

Spend some time at it. Devote at least a few hours over the several months before your trip to find the best fares. Obviously this matters more for a family buying 3+ tickets than a single flyer so you can adjust that time committment accordingly.

Waiting until last minute is usually a bad idea, esp if only weeks are left, because you'll have to take whatever fare comes up. However you can also book too early. Summer discount specials often don't come up until spring and I've often found good rates into June for July and August travel though I don't like to wait that long.

Get on email alert lists for Orbitz and others. This will help remind you to keep looking and will alert you to fare decreases.

Don't forget your car - this can be more than the cost of the plane ticket, and car prices vary a lot. If you see one of those "129 per week" specials book it immediately. This year appears to be bad for car discounts. And...get a *small* car. Rates approach the absurd for SUVs and big rental cars. If you have money to burn get a small car, save hundreds per week, and make a donation to mosquito nets to save some lives.

Check out some of the new prediction tools for ticket prices like Yahoo's FareCast

Airline Tickets and Hotel Rooms - finding the lowest price.

Airlines Tickets and Hotels- finding the lowest prices

How to get low airline and hotel rates are the most common questions I get as a travel internet guy. The short answer is to check Hotwire.com and Kayak.com. If their price seems good take it, otherwise wait a week and try again. Note that with Hotwire you will NOT know the specific location. This is usually fine for most major destinations, and Hotwire generally features nice properties.

Many think wrongly that contacting a hotels or airline directly leads to the lowest price for a room or airline ticket. This is often NOT true, though you should generally view the hotel or airline's own website for the rate because an increasing number of hotels are offering price guarantees if you book via their sites. Note that generally this creates a large savings for them because they don't have to pay a commission. Unfortunately booking via the hotel sites rarely saves you more than a few dollars of savings vs the lowest online rates.

There is NO magic bullet or specific website or simple technique for finding cheap rates, rather you need to to surf around and look for "consolidators" that are *usually* cheaper than the hotels or airlines themselves.

Hotels.com is a large and popular consolidator, but Travelocity, Expedia, and Priceline are also major consolidators and there are hundreds of smaller ones. In Europe, for example, any of those or Venere - a consolidator focused on European hotels - may find you a cheap room.

I have NOT used Priceline much recently because in the early days it was frustrating to work with and I found few rates that beat Hotels.com. My belief now is that Priceline is generally only a good choice for higher end hotels and then only if you have the time to search and wait for good rates and the flexibility to change hotels and plans as needed to get a good rate.

Kayak.com is an excellent service that allows you to search different airports and airlines quickly and easily. For example in June of 2006 I found Kayak's American Airlines rate was lower than the airline and lower than all other consolidators. I'd guess Kayak had a special deal with American for this route.

Consider OneTime.com if you want to compare MANY different consolidators at once.

An example of the consolidator advantage: In early 2006 I used a small flight consolidator called cheapseats.com to book Delta to Boston and paid about $100 less than the cheapest fare Delta had online at the same time. This situation is common in travel because pricing is very market driven and surprisingly inconsistent both for flights and hotels.

As a travel publishing guy I know how some of the hotel deals are cut and it's a very sloppy and counter-intuitive process where some consolidators will force properties to sell them blocks of rooms far below rack rate in exchange for a guarantee of selling those rooms. Hotels.com is notoriously unpopular with many hotels as the top consolidator because they tend to squeeze great deals from properties in exchange for guaranteed volume and lots of bookings. Good for you the consumer but hard on the profit margin for the properties.

If, at the last minute, the consolidator has a lot of rooms left they may sell them at rates far below what the hotel will charge if you call them. You especially see this in places like Vegas and big cities. During a November Vegas trip I got the Hilton through (Travelocity I think) for about $55 which I think was under their own website rate and under the rate at other places I checked. Yet during a March trip I found the best price for Oriental Palace at their own site - an excellent $65 nightly for a nice room in the middle of the strip plus some buffets. (though I did have to switch rooms due to noise from a room in the wing above Harrah's, which features an outdoor rock music pavillion open until about 2pm).