Fare Deals - finding cheap plane tickets

Kristin W. Davis

TRAVEL You can score CHEAP PLANE TICKETS if you're flexible and pull a sneaky trick or two.

AIRFARES ROSE SO swiftly last year you could almost see the contrails. Today the average round-trip airline ticket costs more than $300. But finding bargains in what's become an intricate circus of phantom fares and Saturday stay-overs is still possible, if you know where to look.

Officially, ticket prices climbed 11.6% between December 1999 and January 2001. But that doesn't include the fuel surcharges airlines began tacking on, which can add as much as $40 to a round-trip. (Airlines blame the increases on soaring jet-fuel costs, plus pressure for better pay from pilots, flight attendants and ground crews.) With fares climbing, developing some travel savvy has never been more important. Prices won't improve when United and American gobble up US Airways and TWA and, between them, control 50% of the U.S. market. "Less competition means higher prices, decreased customer service and serious service disruptions in the event of a labor dispute," says Richard Copland, president of the American Society of Travel Agents.

Competition is the reason it costs $465 to fly from Des Moines to Detroit but $171 to fly an additional 83 miles from Des Moines to Lansing, Mich., connecting through Detroit. Northwest is the only airline that flies nonstop from Des Moines to Detroit; but to Lansing, Northwest competes with United and Midwest Express. The same scenario plays out all over the country. Airfares are reasonable if you're traveling a route served by several airlines, especially if one of them is a low-fare carrier such as Air-Tran, America West, American Trans Air, Frontier, Southwest Airlines or Sun Country. But where little or no competition exists, airlines hold you hostage, and you pay.

Two-pronged approach

WITH BIG AIRLINES, it will become more difficult to find a cheap ticket, so you'll need some strategies to bring order to the chaos. Your best bet is a two-pronged approach. First, thanks to the Internet, travelers can tap more information about flights and airfares than ever before, and an hour or less of searching can save you hundreds of dollars. Second, flexibility is a surprisingly important money-saver. Driving an hour or two to a competitive airport or shifting a vacation trip by a couple of days can reap big savings.

For this story we researched itineraries using a half-dozen Web sites, and we called travel agents and the airlines. One of the toughest--and most illuminating--scenarios was a hypothetical ski trip for four from Harrisburg, Pa., to Vail, Colo., in March. We started our search at Travelocity.com, which initially showed us a "best" fare on specific travel dates (which included a Saturday-night stay) of $859 per person. The flight routed through both Detroit and Denver, which would take about ten and a half hours each way. Ugh.

A Travelocity feature that lets you search for the best fare on any date turned up a more reasonable $358 fare on American. But it wasn't available in March. The same search also suggested a truly tantalizing option, a $179 round-trip on Northwest Airlines from Washington, D.C.'s Reagan National Airport, about 125 miles from Harrisburg. Yes, it takes two and a half hours to drive from Harrisburg to D.C.; but because the flight had only one stop, in Detroit, the total travel time, including the car trip, would be about two and a half hours shorter than the Harrisburg-Detroit-Denver-Vail odyssey.

Travelocity initially indicated that seats were available for the flight, but when we actually tried to buy a ticket, the seats had evaporated. That, unfortunately, is the chief hazard of some travel Web sites: You may unearth fares that aren't really available. In our trials, Travelocity was particularly prone to this problem. Fares that were designated "available" on a calendar of travel dates often disappeared when we tried to book them.

But knowing that a $179 fare was available somewhere, at some point, spurred us on. We priced airfares at several other sites, including Expedia.com (best fare, $651), OneTravel.com. ($536) and TravelByUs.com ($500). TravelByUs is a favorite because it also allows you to search for fares into and out of alternative airports within a radius you choose. Searching within 150 miles of Harrisburg and Vail, for instance, turned up a $269 nonstop from Philadelphia to Denver, which would require about two hours of driving on each end.

That wasn't good enough. We were determined to hunt down that $179 fare, so we called Northwest. Just asking for the fare to our destination was not the way to go. We were told there were no coach seats left on our chosen return date and we'd have to pay $1,436 each to fly first-class. Asking about alternative airports and dates got us better fares, including a $361 round-trip from Reagan. But when we asked, "How can I get that $179 fare?" we learned that by shifting our trip by three days (leaving and returning on consecutive Tuesdays rather than Saturdays), we could capture the superlow fare, flying our four ski bums to the Rockies for just $968.

Yes, that's more than $179 times four--thanks to another hazard of Internet fare quotes (and newspaper ads, too): Fares sometimes don't include taxes and surcharges. So that $179 ticket really cost $242, a full 35% more. Disappointing, but still our best bet.

Would we have saved ourselves an hour or so of searching by calling a travel agent? The agent we called in Harrisburg found better fares than most of the search engines by routing us into Breckenridge, Colo., about 40 miles from Vail, the lowest being $427 from Philadelphia. With prompting, she also found a $387 fare out of Washington Dulles.

If you have a travel agent you use regularly to book travel, he or she may be willing to dig deep for you. But agents now earn so little on air tickets (a 5% commission from the airline, plus whatever fee the agents themselves may charge), the incentive to spend time on a one-time customer is slim. "Just for a cold call, it's hard to get someone to care about your air ticket," concedes Kathy Sudeikis, a travel agent with All About Travel, in Mission, Kan. "Here the junior people are taking cold calls, not the salespeople who can be selling cruises."

Timing is everything

THE DAY OF THE week you fly, and the hour of the day, make a difference. Airlines closely analyze every route and every scheduled flight to determine

how many seats on a plane go for bargain excursion fares and how many are set aside for business travelers, who don't buy as far in advance and who want tickets they can change or cancel without penalty. If the 5 P.M. Friday flight from Dallas to Chicago usually carries 85% business travelers, the airline is going to put very few seats up for sale at fares palatable to leisure travelers. But the 3 P.M. Saturday flight will probably have many more low-fare seats.

In general, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays are the most promising days for cheap fares. So you can often save by planning a long weekend around a Monday off (leaving on Saturday and returning Tuesday morning), instead of the more-typical Friday off, says Sudeikis.

But on any day, once the initial allotment of low-fare seats sells out, more seats may open up if the airline does not sell higher-fare seats as rapidly as it projected. "A seat is a perishable product," says Doug Killian, a spokesman for Northwest Airlines, and fares are "tweaked on a regular basis." That's why, while it pays to book at least 21 days in advance, you may not be doing yourself a favor by booking many months in advance. "A lot of people call a travel agent real early to get on that plane," says Joel Leach, co-author of Airline Secrets Exposed (Studio 4 Productions, $14.95). "Often it's better to wait until about four weeks before departure."

That advice doesn't apply to high-demand times, such as holidays, and won't do when you absolutely must be there for, say, a wedding. But if you buy your ticket well in advance and it goes on sale later, you may be able to get a refund for the difference. The seat you've already purchased must qualify for the new lower fare. (If, for instance, it requires a 21-day advance purchase, you must still be outside the 21-day window.) If you want a cash refund, you'll pay a change fee, usually $75, to have the ticket reissued--but you're still ahead if the fare difference is more than that. You can also choose to take a full refund in the form of a voucher good for future travel on the same airline.

A travel agent or the airline can handle either kind of refund. If you bought through a travel agent, ask the agent to monitor fares for you. Otherwise, try Travelocity's Fare Watcher feature, which sends you an e-mail if your seat goes on sale.

Guerrilla tactics

US AIRWAYS charges $439 to fly nonstop from Boston to Charlotte, N.C., one of its hubs. But the fare from Boston to Savannah, Ga., through Charlotte, is just $205--and again, the culprit is competition. (No nonstop competition exists between Boston and Charlotte.) So why not buy a ticket to Savannah and use only the Boston-to-Charlotte and Charlotte-to-Boston portions? That strategy, called "hidden city" ticketing, is one that consumer advocates used to recommend enthusiastically. They don't anymore because airlines have cracked down on the practice.

"I think you ought to be able to use as little or as much of a product as you want," says Terry Trippler, the travel expert at OneTravel.com. "But I wouldn't suggest anyone try hidden city. It's really risky." Airlines say that hidden-city tickets violate their fare rules. To prevent you from using them, many now program their computers to cancel your reservation when you don't use the first leg of your return trip. When you show up for the second leg, you may be stuck buying a ticket home at the walk-up fare. It's a costly move: The one-way, day-of-travel fare from Charlotte to Boston was $540 in January.

In cases like this one, in which the hidden-city fare is less than half the normal fare, you could buy a round-trip ticket in each direction, use only the first portion of each, and save a little money. That, too, is against the rules, but it would be tough to catch. The same is true if you find you have to buy a one-way ticket. The roundtrip is certain to be cheaper, and the airline can't penalize you if you throw away the second half of the ticket.

Some travelers use another forbidden tactic, called back-to-back ticketing, to avoid having to stay over a Saturday night to get the best fare. This involves buying two tickets--one, for instance, leaving on Friday the sixth and returning Friday the 13th, and a second leaving on Monday the ninth and returning Monday the 16th. You'd use the outbound portion of the second ticket on the ninth and the return portion of the first ticket on the 13th, and throw away the rest. To pocket a savings, the excursion fare has to be less than half the unrestricted fare, which it often is.

Airlines say they are also cracking down on back-to-back tickets. When they catch travel agents writing them, they charge the agency for the difference in fare. Airlines say they intend to take away frequent-flier miles from passengers who book their own back-to-back tickets, which can be tracked through frequent-flier records, but it's unclear to what extent they're really doing it.

When you can't stay over a Saturday night--and if it's practical--try booking your flight through Las Vegas. A little-known airline quirk is that Saturday-stay requirements are waived on flights to and through "casino cities" to encourage casino traffic. You can also try a low-fare airline, like Southwest, that doesn't charge more for a trip without a Saturday-night stay.

Hit-or-miss alternatives

WHEN AIRLINES need to dump seats they think they can't book, they sell them at deep discount to consolidators, who in turn offer them at bargain prices to the public. These are the low fares you see advertised in Sunday newspaper travel sections. Consolidators also sell through travel agents and over the Internet (try Economytravel.com). Travel agents say they're best for international travel, especially in the off-season, and for domestic travel at the last minute.

Another Web site worth checking is Bestfares.com, which tracks fare sales, including the last-minute weekend fares that many airlines offer via e-mail. If you're willing to arrange your travel around a sale, you may find a bargain here.

Finally, for the adventurous, there are the auction sites, including Expedia.com's PriceMatcher and Priceline.com. You name your maximum price and dates you want to travel, and enter your credit card number. If your bid is accepted, you're obligated to buy the nonrefundable ticket, without seeing the airline, flight times or number of connections in advance (although you can specify that you want no more than one connection).

The major airlines sponsor a similar site, Hotwire.com, on which they quote a bid for the city pair you enter and give you 30 minutes to buy at that price. But you still don't know which airline or flight times you've purchased.

So many places exist where you can chase after rock-bottom airfares that sometimes the trick is to stop hunting before you get overwhelmed. "Get to the point where you say to yourself, `That's a fair price, I'll take it,'" advises OneTravel.com's Trippler. "If you go in with the idea that you're going to get the absolute lowest fare," he says, "you could go nuts."

--Reporter: JOSEPHINE ROSSI

Kiplinger.com

Best of the super search sites. Which sites scour deepest for bargains? We searched a half-dozen sites for the cheapest fares for five itineraries.

COPYRIGHT 2001 The Kiplinger Washington Editors, Inc.
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