Crazy Airfare Sales

[jba]

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There is almost never a reason to buy tickets through a travel website. Use them to check airfares and compare, yes. But then go directly to the airline site to buy, you'll save the travel site fees and sometimes can even find even better fares. (This is especially true for hotels lately, where a lot of the chains are offering exclusives only through their sites.)

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to add to this, most of the airlines will give you 500-1k bonus miles for booking through their website.

[jba]

another great site for searching for flights and hotels on kayak.com. You do not book through them, they just refer you to other travel or provider sites.

[Badger]

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Dockers is having some promotion where if you spend $125 at JCPenney before June 9th, you get a free round trip flight to one of several good locations. Check it out here: http://dockersfreeflight.com/

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This sounds like a too good to be true offer. I received a free flight from signing up for a Citibank checking account, but I see how they can make money off the deal through new customers.
I'm guessing they figure that enough people will fail to follow through with the paperwork, making this profitable. Thanks for the tip, I'll check this out.

farecast looks like a handy site. I've used kayak in the past which looks pretty similar from a first glance.

[RiverFenix]

Some extra details on the dockers thing I just did some quick reading on it this morning.
You can buy online or in person. If you buy online theyre even more discount codes you can use for shipping and %s off. Check out fatwallet to find them.
You have to leave from one of the destination cities and you choose 3 cities to go to. Which one you get isn't assured so you'll get one of them.
Limit 2 per household.

[Hellmouth]

A few tips I have read about.

Lowest prices are almost always found about 8 weeks from the departure date. That is when all airlines start pushing to fill the planes up. From there they almost always rise.

Check out Tuesdays from noon to midnight for the best deals since that is the day that prices are adjusted.

Tuesdays about 8 weeks out = $$$ savings.

Btw. I read this in a CNN article I think so if I can dig it up I will. It had some other nice hints as well.

Greg

[yad]

www.flyertalk.com

[Wes Mantooth]

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There is almost never a reason to buy tickets through a travel website. Use them to check airfares and compare, yes. But then go directly to the airline site to buy, you'll save the travel site fees and sometimes can even find even better fares. (This is especially true for hotels lately, where a lot of the chains are offering exclusives only through their sites.)
...

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I noticed this as well. sidestep.com finds some great prices, its one site to least check first to see what airlines are flying in/out of certain cities with the best prices. Then check out those individual airline sites.

[MrMon]

I like sidestep as well. It's SUPPOSED to check SW, which most other sites don't do, but I've not been finding it has been doing SW lately.

www.airfarewatchdog.com is pretty good about sending out alerts on the best fares from your city. Sometimes they aren't fast enough and you miss the best deals, but they're useful if you're just looking for someplace to go cheap.

C'mon SW, what's today's deal? No Ding! offer yet.

[IggyWH]

A few other sites to check out :

www.farecast.com ~ They track flights and then give you an idea on price history whether now is a good time to buy or if you should wait. You can even purchase a guarantee through them for (I think) $10, but if you book direct through an airline, you can usually get a voucher for price difference if the flight becomes cheaper.

Which leads me to :

www.yapta.com - It's a firefox r IE addon where you can tag flights from certain websites and it'll track the price for you. If you buy a flight, you tell it how much you paid and it'll notify you if the price changes to something lower so you can try and get a refund of some kind.

Here's a screenshot from Yapta of a flight I purchased and it being tracked :

[delta k]

Anyone here from Minnesota or deal with a particularly horrible home city to fly from? Minneapolis is like 90% Northwest and that makes it very expensive and inconvenient to fly from, and none of these discount sites work very well since they always have me making 3 connections and traveling 18 hours to get from here to Boston and it still costs a lot.