Fare Deals - finding cheap plane tickets

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, May, 2001 by Kristin W. Davis

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.