WHEN FLYING

To avoid surprises, be sure to ask about all taxes, service fees, and charges for ticket delivery or other incidentals. Get a total ("What is the total amount that will be charged to my credit card for airfare and ALL other fees and services?") before you agree to pay anything.

ALSO:

1. Before flying, try your best to call the airline (a week in advance or more), and reserve
a seat on the plane, if you can. Don't just show up hoping a seat is yours. QUITE A FEW airlines
will OVER BOOK the flights, and the last ones there / last to reserve a seat, don't get one if everyone
shows up.
2. For international flights, show up 1 1/2 hours early at least, and check your luggage, if checking.


NORTH AMERICAN AIRFARES::::

Local (US) travelers:

 Are travel agents' services worth paying for? Surveys by journalists and consumer organizations have consistently found that good travel agents can use their expertise in finding the best fares to save most travelers enough money to cover the agents' fees. This shouldn't be surprising when one considers that the CRS's on which all airlines, travel agents, and robotic Web-based ticket sales sites rely for their data are owned by one or more of the airlines, and are optimized for their purposes: getting you to pay more, not less. The last thing computerized reservation system (CRS)'s are optimized for is getting travelers the lowest prices. It takes considerable skill and practice to use these tools to achieve a purpose directly contrary to the developers' intent.

Don't waste your time, or that of a travel agent, by calling international ticket discounters for discounts on flights within North America.

Foreign travelers in the US:

The best deals on airline tickets for travel within North America are special "Visit USA" and "Visit North America" fares for foreign visitors that are sold only outside North America. So foreign visitors should buy their tickets for travel within the USA in their home countries, and should not expect to be able to get cheaper prices once they get to the USA. Tickets within North America are invariably at least as expensive at the last minute as if you plan ahead, and usually much more expensive. Drastic "last-minute" discounts are, for the most part, a myth.


In particular, it's important to realize that none of the largest USA-based online agencies list ANY unpublished or consolidator fares on any domestic or international route. This includes Travelocity, Preview Travel, Microsoft Expedia, GetThere.com (ITN.net), Trip.com, and the many other Web sites (including Yahoo, Netscape, Alta Vista, Excite, Infoseek, etc.) that use "private label" versions of one of these "booking engines" to provide their travel services.

Don't be misled by claims to "guarantee the lowest applicable fare". All that means is that the lowest applicable published fare. So what? You want an agency that charges less than the published fare. Unless an agency specifically advertises "consolidator" prices or "prices lower than the airlines", you can assume that their offerings are limited to published (list) prices.

If you want discounts, you have to go to a discounter. How do you find one? Most travel agencies -- including most brick-and-mortar travel agencies AND most online agencies -- are useless in finding domestic USA consolidator tickets. There is no single source of information or comparisons of prices from different consolidators. Each lists only their own prices.

Cheap Tickets (cheaptickets.com) sells mostly by phone, but does an increasingly large part of its business through its Web site. Prior to Priceline, Cheap Tickets was probably the single largest consolidator of domestic USA tickets. The Cheap Tickets Web site lists only their consolidator prices; it's up to you to check a published- fare site to see if a published sale fare might be lower.

Lowestfare.com also sells both by phone and over the Web. The agency is owned in part by Carl Icahn, former CEO of TWA. As part of Icahn's severance agreement with TWA, he is able to buy all TWA tickets at a certain percentage discount from the published fare. (TWA contended, unsuccessfully, that the agreement was only supposed to cover tickets for Icahn's own use, not for resale.) This deal expires in 2003. In late 1999, following its IPO, Lowestfare.com bought Jetset Tours, a major wholesale-only international consolidator. Thus far, none of Jetset's prices have been made available through Lowestfare.com, and Lowestfare.com has made no comment on its plans. For now, Lowestfare.com is of interest mainly for domestic USA travel: if TWA has the lowest published fare for your route, you can probably get tickets cheaper through Lowestfare.com.

1Travel.com is the least-known of the major online domestic USA consolidators, but offers the widest array of choices and, as of now, the only integrated display of comparative display of published and consolidator prices. Of course, they list only their own consolidator prices, so some other consolidator might have a lower price. But at least you don't have to check a separate published-fare site to see how their consolidator prices compare to current published sales. They also offer (in the same integrated comparison), so-called "white-label fares" that offer many of the advantages of tickets from Priceline without the drawbacks of hidden prices or unforeseeable schedules. These "white-label" prices are listed with the route, schedule, and price -- everything except the airline name.


International airfares

The glut of official international fare information available through gateways to computerized reservation systems (CRS's) such as GetThere.com, Travelocity, Microsoft Expedia, etc. is deceptively comprehensive-seeming and impressive but fundamentally useless in finding discounted prices.

-->If you want to pay less than the official international fare, you have to buy your ticket from an agent who gives discounts, not from an airline directly or from a source (such as a CRS Web site) that is limited to published (and REGULATED) fares. These regulated international fares are the ones that the airlines cannot get around.

Go to a few travel agents, and Ask, "Do you have discounts from point A to point B." Compare prices.

Last-minute discounts?

Many people have heard that they can get a cheaper ticket if they wait until the last minute, when "airlines sell off blocks of unsold seats cheaply to consolidators, who sell them for whatever they can get". THIS IS ALMOST ALWAYS NOT TRUE. Airlines and agencies don't really work that way. It is sometimes possible to get a cheap ticket on very short notice, but you rarely get a cheaper ticket than if you had planned ahead, and it may be impossible to get a reasonable price, or even to find any available space at all, at the last minute.


In Addition

You'll get the best price if you shop around, but remember that rating an around the world itinerary can take an hour of work (for which the agent is paid nothing if you end up getting the ticket elsewhere). So don't be surprised that the fare isn't in the computer and can't be given off the top of the agent's head; the agent will give only a very rough estimate of the fare unless you make clear that you are really serious about getting the ticket from that agency if the price is right.

Be especially cautious about buying tickets from a "sub-agent" or an agency which is not accredited by the International Airline Travel Agents' Network (IATAN) and, in the USA, the Airline Reporting Corporation (ARC). Sub-agents and non-ARC/IATAN agents cannot issue any of their own tickets, but must purchase them all from other agencies, wholesalers, or the airlines. Since the basic qualifications for ARC and IATAN appointment are proof of financial means and ticketing experience, non-ARC/IATAN agents are, by definition, inexperienced, under-financed, or both.

If you have any doubt, you should try to check directly with the airlines, immediately before paying for your tickets, to make sure that you are holding confirmed reservations. This is not always possible, as some of your flights may be on airlines that have no representation in the country in which you are buying your tickets. (Don't try to request seat assignments or other special services, or frequent flyer numbers, until after you have your tickets in hand). Just verify that you have reservations on the flights you want. Some special prices forbid or restrict things like advance seat assignments or frequent flyer mileage credit, and by requesting such things prior to ticketing you could cause your reservations to be canceled or render your reservations ineligible for the special fare.)

Contrary to some ill-advised recommendations that have been widely distributed on the Net, you should NOT make reservations directly with the airline and then try to shop around for the best price at which to have them ticketed. Nor should you make reservations with more than one travel agency.

Some airlines refuse even to consider for confirmation passengers holding more than one reservation; some airlines will automatically cancel all reservations, whether or not confirmed, of anyone found to be holding multiple bookings

Some/most information sourced from: here

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