Airline Ticket Bargains - some times it pays to ... wait.

A popular misconception about Airline ticket prices is that buying tickets earlier is always better. On the contrary it is often best to wait for good prices - sometimes to weeks of your trip although you generally are taking some risks to wait, especially if you have limited flexibility.

A good case in point is my upcoming trip from Medford, Oregon MFR to Minneapolis MSP. I've been watching tickets for this trip for months and the best deal I've seen was bout 450 until today, when I got our 3 tickets at 350. The online memo said "last three tickets at this price" and it is possible I've missed better deals, but this is generally a great price from our regional airport at Meford to MSP.

Even SMF and PDX - the major airports we sometimes use to save money - were in this price range today so this was a no brainer. Earlier I'd seen as low as $200 but that would have had us flying on Thanksgiving day on big fat full bellies. Not ... a pretty picture?

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.