Turiki Int Co.

Back in the days (not that far, just like 5 years ago), to get a good price on a ticket I would call up travel agents and they usually gave me better deal than what there was on the Internet.

Times have changed and now there are more and more travel agents on the Internet and airlines themselves release cheapest ticket to the Net. From each day it gets easier and easier to get a good price on the ticket, but research still can lead to even sweeter deal.

For domestic flights (I fly very few of them, so might be wrong in something):

1. Search kayak.com for best deals and do +/- 3 days (unless you have strict schedule)
2. Check out if there are some deals at TravelZoo
3. Check nearby airports (like in Cleveland we have Akron which has Frontier)
4. You can try your luck at Priceline, but for me it never worked out

For international flights it’s a little bit more complicated (I mostly fly to Europe and Russia):

1. Search kayak.com +/- 3 days to get rough estimate of the prices
2. Of course, check out TravelZoo, maybe the have some deals - though, I’ve never found any that would suit me
3. Check if you can incorporate some budget airline into your flight, so like I am going to do in July:
1. Fly to London on a non-stop flight from Cleveland
2. Then fly some budget airline to Barcelona - comes out to about $200 or so cheaper than the cheapest ticket.
3. For me it is also an advantage, because I’ll buy expensive trans-atlantic ticket now and then buy cheap EU one later (because I might decide to change my itinerary and fly to Russia first for few days)
4. You can check for budget airlines at whichbudget.com or skyscanner.net (latter one I prefer more)
4. See if you can fly to even far away city and then take cheap train/car/bus…
1. I usually fly to Helsinki, because it is much cheaper, then take a $30 bus to Saint Petersburg for 4 hours : )
2. Or when fly to Minsk (Belarus), it is better to fly on a budget airline to Vilnius and then take a bus or train to Minsk
5. Search airline web-sites by themselves. Even though meta-searches search them, but sometimes(rarely, but happened) I get absolutely different price at airline web-site. To make the process faster one might use BookingBuddy
6. When doing complicated multi-leg flights, play with each leg separately and then try to assemble them into one ticket, e.g. Orbitz lets you do it.
1. When recently we flew first to Madrid for a week, then to India for a month and then to Russia for 2 weeks,  I made a single ticket for a total of ~$1500 - that’s really nice price for such complicated flight  : )
2. Sometimes you have to set the preferred airlines, otherwise Orbitz might not find flights that you need. Like for India trip I set US Airways and Aeroflot - worked great.
7. To research flights, times and approximate price use ITA Software tool - the same software that is used by Orbitz and Cheaptickets. It can also search tickets in the period of month - very useful. Multi-City search works good as well.

That’s all I can think of top of my head right now. Don’t forget to search for local airlines, when fly inside different countries.

Have a pleasant flight! 

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 11:34 pm and is filed under Transportation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.