Sleuthing Fares

By Anita Hamilton

Consider this my penance. About a year ago, I subjected readers of this column to 600 words of woe, detailing my frustrating--and ultimately fruitless--online search for a holiday getaway. This year I've cleaned up my act by cutting out the whining and focusing on real solutions. First I homed in on a single goal: figuring out how to get great deals on flights. Then I recruited a crack panel of experts--everyone from Travelocity CEO Terrell Jones to CheapTickets vice president Ron McElfresh--to help me ferret out the best insider tricks. Finally I torture-tested their advice to see if it really flew. Here's what I learned:

LOYALTY IS FOR FRIENDS, not travel websites. No one site has a lock on the best deals. That's why my favorite sites aren't the ones where you directly place orders but rather those that let you quickly compare prices on as many as 20 different sites at once: qixo.com (for both Macs and PCs) and farechase.com (for PC users only). These sites work like search engines by scouring dozens of other sites, then presenting the best prices in one handy list. To book a flight, just click; a link takes you back to the site offering the deal that you like. Just remember: neither Qixo nor FareChase is comprehensive, and each lets you perform only one fairly narrow search at a time, so they may miss some deals.

THINK LIKE AN AGENT. If you live in a major city and want the broadest choice of flights, many sites will let you enter a city code (such as CHI for Chicago, NYC for New York City and WAS for Washington) instead of a specific airport name. Another trick is to log in around midnight central time, when many reservations expire and are dumped back into the pool of available flights. Around Christmas, avoid Dec. 22, 23, 24, 26 and 27. If you don't mind flying on Christmas Day, you'll get the lowest rates of all.

MEMBERSHIP HAS ITS PRIVILEGES. I hate junk e-mail as much as the next person, but it is wise to sign up for automated alerts that tell you when there are great deals on places you would like to visit. Almost every site offers these, but I especially like the ones on lastminutetravel.com travelocity.com and qixo.com Instead of deluging you with weekly messages, they alert you only when fares reach target prices that you have specified in advance.

QUICK AND DIRTY DOESN'T ALWAYS PAY. Nearly every travel site has a five-second, fill-in-the-blank form on its home page. And such sites as priceline.com and newcomer hotwire.com make it easy to find cut rates not offered elsewhere. With those services, though, you don't even know your exact route or departure time until after you commit to a nonrefundable ticket. If you are flexible about the date you want to travel, dig deeper, and you'll do better. On Expedia, click instead on the FareCalendar or the "build your own flight" option for the best choices. On Travelocity, try selecting "any date" for your travel time to find out when you can get the best rates.

TREAT YOURSELF. Always wanted to go to Istanbul? Dying to tour the South Pacific? Travelocity's Dream Maps feature lets you enter any price and departure city, then shows you all available flights in the world. On LastMinuteTravel, select destination "Anywhere" along with your price and departure date--then let your imagination take flight.

Have a tip that you're willing to share for finding cheap flights? E-mail your advice to Anita at [email protected]