Frequent fliers: Getting the best deals?

[zoebartlett]

If you fly frequently, how do you go about booking your flights? What days do you find best to travel? How far out do you make your reservations? If you're renting a car, do you book both at the same time online or take care of the car separately? We're using gift cards for our flights and it looks like almost one of our tickets will be covered. We've usually booked them separately, but I'm not sure which one gets you a better deal.

We don't fly often and although I try to find good deals out there, I always wonder if I could do better. It's not quite set in stone, but we're looking to fly to Portland, OR this summer (most likely the end of June or early in July). The trip will probably be anywhere from 5-7 days. There are two airports we could fly from, so I'm just playing around online trying to find the best deal from both. Comparing everything makes my head spin though. Do you have any tips? Thanks in advance!

 

[MollyMalone]

I like Kayak, Zoe, because it gives quotes for multiple airlines all at once & it's so easy to add/eliminate/sort various filters such as number of stops, nearby airports, total flying time, and their bar graphs quickly show you what time of day is least expensive to fly on your chosen dates (which are also easy to quickly change) -- and they also give an educated guesstimate, based on past history, on whether you're better off buying now or waiting.
http://www.kayak.com/
Southwestern Airlines doesn't release their fares to Kayak or other travel search engines like Google Flights, so if SW serves the airports in question, you'll need to go to their own web site... although it's been my experience of late that SW isn't nearly as advantageous, price-wise, as it used to be. If Jet Blue serves the airports you'd be using, sign up to be a True Blue member so you'll get the e-mail alerts about special sales (usually those prices are good for 24-48 hrs); their special sales are consistently the best deals amongst all the domestic airlines I use.

Expedia, for one, *sometimes* shows "hacker fares" (using different airlines coming and going) that don't show up on Kayak, so depending on how much time you want to devote to this research, that's another possibility.

Domestic airlines seem to typically adjust their fares on Tuesday mornings & more of them are offering the ability to lock in a fare, without paying, for X number of hours before you have to make up your mind -- either at no charge or for a small fee. So if you put dibs on a fare on, say, Sunday night, do another search around noon on Tuesday to see if the price dropped. And clear your browser's cookies cache each time since there have been studies that suggest that's the best way to ensure you're not being quoted a higher fare by the airlines than a newbie search would reflect.

Think the only reason to ever book a rental car through an airline's reservation system is if that earns you frequent flyer miles -- and if you fly often enough with the particular airline (or one of its partners) for that to be a worthwhile consideration.

Hope this is of some help!

 

[zoebartlett]

Thanks so much, Molly! I appreciate the advice. There are so many sites out there, but I think I might need to go straight to the specific airline's site that our gift cards are from. I never would have thought about clearing my browser's cookie cache. We'll stick with booking our car rental separately. Thanks again!