Searching for the best deals on flights!

My fiance has a few interviews scheduled next month scattered across the country, so the last few days have been busy around here trying to nail down all the arrangements. I pretty much took on the responsibility of making the arrangements, so he can take the time to focus on preparing for the interviews. For these plans, not only am I looking for the best monetary deal, but I take into consideration the ease of him getting around, with the least amount of stress and hassle.

I usually take great satisfaction in finding great deals, but I don't enjoy searching for the best flights deals. However, I do the best I can when the time arises. And since I am diligent in my searches, people tend to rely on me to find them the best flight prices too, which has given me alot of practice navigating this process.

I find that no one website is consistent at finding the best deals, and the prices seems to change daily, if not multiple times a day. I tend to start with kayak.com, playing with dates if this is a flexible option. Then I start looking at one way flights, seeing which airlines have the best deals in each direction on the dates I want. I may surf over to other 'discount' airline websites, but usually, from here, I go directly to the airlines websites to see if I can come up with an even better deal than found. Sometimes I'm sucessful, and sometimes I'm not.

After going through this process tonight, I had a "Doh" moment right after confirming my flight. When shopping online, there is usually a way to double dip and find other benefits or promotions. Since I have a upromise account, I try to always check their website right before paying for anything online. Forgetting completely to heed my own advice, I didn't check the upromise website before searching and booking my flight, and missed out on some additional savings. Not a huge bummer, but just something to keep in mind for next time. At least I did remember to take advantage of this by the time I got around to booking the car rental!

Once place we could have saved money would have been the optional rental insurance on the rental car. This fee was actually more than the charge for the car for two days!! Unfortunately, my fiances' car insurance is held by his parents, so we were unable to confirm if it included rental coverage. It is my understanding that it is included most of the time, but not wanting to chance it, we did pay for this option.

Oh, and one other thing to keep in mind when looking for best prices - discount cards. However, my advice is to not always assume you're getting the best deals with them! While searching for hotel deals, this is the pricing difference we got:

1. Hotel website, regular price - $80.00/night
2. Hotel website, with AAA discount - $84.95/night
3. Discount website, hotels.com - $80.00/night

I did a double take after I selected AAA discount and the price increased. Actually, I laughed out loud. Just something to consider!

So my overall advice:
1. Don't just assume that your discount card gives you the best priced deal. Try the same deal using multiple promotions and no promotion at all. For todays example, no promotion at all on the hotel booking gave me the best price.

2. If you see a great price, try not to hesitate. Before you know it, its gone, and has been replaced with a higher priced ticket. This happens to me all the time. I don't know if it's true, but when I end up oversearching for the best deal for a specific flight pattern, it seems to create a temporary artifical demand, and the prices inflate for a couple of days before returning back to the original price I spotted them for.

3. When flying, you don't need to take the same airline for both legs of a round trip segment. Using multiple websites, both the airline sites and discount sites, over a course of multiple days saved us $300! We actually booked the departing flight first, and didn't find a good deal on the return flight for another two days. We took a risk hoping flight prices would decrease, and this time it paid off.

4. On previous trips, we have saved by ordering a package deal with flight and hotels, or flight and a car rental. This sometimes does the trick. Sometimes, it doesn't. In our case, we needed a specific hotel, which was not an option in any of the package deals.

All this work, and only one trip scheduled. Two more to go! It is a positive that these interviews are going on, but on the flip side, I think (know) this will blow the November goals..

Beyond The Horizon