Fare Deals - finding cheap plane tickets

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, May, 2001 by 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.