letsjumpnow

Hey all,

I'm new to this whole airfare jedi mentality, and am trying to figure out how to do this in a way that's smart, economical, fast, AND thorough.

My "workflow":

1) Use gethuman.com for phone numbers of major airlines (usually the four I actually take the time to call are United, Delta, and Southwest).
2) Tell them the dates I want to travel and tell them I'm flexible and looking for the lowest price.
3) While they search, I search Kayak and compare its results to the ones they give me.
4) After they give me a price, I ask if they have YUPP fares, ask if taxes on international flights can be waived, and if they have any special promotions, deals, or other ways of bringing down the cost of the ticket.

Could anyone suggest improvements to this in any way that will flesh it out? I especially mean international travel; usually airfarewatchdog's mailing list or Southwest has me covered on domestic.

Thanks!

Alec

CMHFlyerOH

Taxes on international tickets can be waived? Why not just book through kayak directly, though their portal. With the exception of Southwest, I tend to find most phone agents to be poorly trained and they're never able to offer a cheaper fare. If anything, it's $10-$25 more expensive because of the fee most agents charge to book over the phone. Southwest fares are almost always cheaper if booked over the phone, too, unless you are booking at the last minute.

MarkXS

From this thread and your other two about agents with deals, and your trip to Brazil, it's obvious how excited you are about this upcoming travel. That's great!

I second the advice about not bothering calling the airlines. You will just pay more. As a college student you're no doubt used to using the internet for pretty much everything. You'll always find better deals online than by calling. As CMHFlyerOH mentioned, you end up paying more due to agent ticketing fees, and it probably takes longer.

Unless you're looking at student-oriented sites (perhaps statravel.com) or consolidators (do searches on FT and on the net at large), then you're better off using the main online travel sites and meta-search sites like kayak rather than calling around.

Orbitz is surprisingly good about putting together odd combos of flights that don't show up easily on the airlines' onw sites, at least not easily. Also they have a flexible feature for dates with several options (length of trip over 30 days period, or weekends in a month, or +/- 3 days) and they're about the only site that lets you specify up to 3 airlines, or a preferred airline alliance. I often don't care if I'm specifically on UA but I might want to search only Star Alliance (all airlines that I can credit to UA) or Skyteam (all airlines that I can credit to NW or to DL). So in terms of my workflow, unless I already know that I want to fly UA, or want to fly NW, I might start on Orbitz to quickly see who's cheaper for the timeframe and destination I want. But I might not book there if I then find the UA flight; I'll go to United.com and book it there without Orbitz' $6 fee.

Also speaking of FF programs and alliances - if you think you'll do a lot of travel, you may want to look into focusing on one airline program within an alliance, so you get the most benefit of frequent flyer programs both for redeemable miles (RDM) and for the elite qualifying miles (RDM). I'm not going to go through all of that now, but the MilesBuzz forum here has lots of info on choosing an FF program and alliance, including several by me (do a search for more posts by user). If you're interested in international travel, flying domestically on WN (Southwest) is a waste of earnings.

BTW, why do you think you should get special discounts, taxes waived, etc? That seems a bit like "I want a pony " thinking. Unless you're in some special category, you're going to be getting the same fares as all the rest of us! I'd like to call up UA and ask for a discount too, but even as a 100K/year flyer on them, they're not going to make up a special fare or waive a fee for me. However, do sign up for the FF programs and email newsletters, because discount codes (not really big ones, but 10% is still useful) do get sent out from time to time. Maybe 1 or 2 a year, and no guarantees at that.

One other piece of advice, and meant in a good spirit, but telling you this before some other FTer will in a less gentle way. Do your own homework first, before asking people for help. Your requests tend to be "tell me who I should call" as if you want us to do your research for you. That isn't thought of well at FT and some FTers will slam you with a quick "do a search".

Good luck with your travels, and enjoy the travel planning, too. It can be fun.

fredpeckville

If you're a student you could probably benefit from flexible dates. Try farecompare.com Be wary though that often it miscalculates international taxes. Which imho you will never get waived

florin

OP: you must not travel very much. I totally agree with MarkXS! Well put.^ The only thing I would add that your workflow is redundant and more time consuming, since calling usually implies some hold time. Forget about calling...

That said, int'l travel is more tricky than domestic. It depends on your flying patterns (e.g. Asia markets are very different than European ones). If you're looking to take a one-time trip somewhere... then it's not worth the effort unless you really have the time. If COST is your ultimate goal (and from what you said, that seems to be the case), then patiently looking on a bunch of sites may just do the trick. Sure, you could follow up on markets and identify trends, see when prices tend to fluctuate and how, and so on... but for 1 or 2 trips/year it's hardly worth the 10% you may be saving, especially if maximizing miles and FF benefits is not part of the equation.

Michael

It's been a while since I was a student, but at that time I always found the best deals on international travel through the student travel agencies (STA, Council Travel) and the consolidators, as these two groups had special negotiated fares which were not available over the internet or direct from the airlines.

I don't know if this is still the case today, but if so, I would give these agencies a try.

- Michael

letsjumpnow

Thank you much everyone for your help thus far!

If my questions seem impulsive, please forgive me--I am also researching my butt off throughout the rest of the site as I ask them! I feel like I'm tapping into a giant genius brain here, and try to structure my questions, even if redundant, in a way that will help future people with similar questions find what they're looking for.

I suppose I was misinformed about waiving the domestic connection parts of international flights; I read this in an ebook. Per calling agents, you all are right, even I was better at finding deals than they were! This was more of an experiment; my assumption was that, in a system (airfares, miles, etc) so complicated, full of loopholes, and privy to seemingly conjuring discounts and miles out of thin air, I thought there MUST be a strategy for getting good rates via dealing with a good ole human being.

Needless to say, I am learning a LOT here, and thank you all again for your continued help.

AQ