Frugal Traveling Tips

[Spoofee]

The holidays are coming up and it's time to take a vacation / visit family / etc. Please suggest your traveling tips to us.

Minimal Steps
1. Pick a destination and time frame

2. Pick a flight Use Sidestep to find the lowest flight cost. They will scan through other web sites to compare. Also gives you a choice of choosing airports near the one you chose.

3. Pick your seat Some flights allow you to pick a seat, see seatguru or seatexpert to see which seats are the best for your plane.

4. Pick a Hotel Use TravelAxe to find the cheapest rate. It's a downloadable program that will go to many sites and pull prices for hotel rooms. Priceline is also a service where you can state how much you are willing to pay and they'll find you a hotel. Read this article for Priceline tips.


Other Tips
- We found Costco travel to give unbeatable rates when you get the hotel/flight together.

 

[Spoofee]

If you are really on a tight budget, you can always sleep at the airport

 

[groove1]

www.farechase.yahoo.com is good too. It searches all the websites for the lowest price. It has helped me get cheap flights, but a couple of times I found lower prices elsewhere.

 

[msobell]

if you're a student, STA Travel has awesome rates even on xcountry flights.. ive found them for $300 JFK/SFO round trip

 

[elgrangus]

I have 2 favorites sites. First one in www.kayak.com
It lets you buy the ticket on the website so they make no money. You get sent to i.e. American Airlines website. It always displays the total $, with fees and taxes. The interface is real nice.

The other one i like is called. www.onetime.com
This one opens several websited at one time.
Check it out.

 

[groove1]

I just compared prices on farechase and kayak.com. Same exact non-stop flight from Charlotte to Buffalo over Thankgsgiving was $375 on kayak (includes all taxes and fees) and was $320 on farechase (excludes taxes and fees). So farechase would still be a little cheaper on this one.

 

[sy44]

Another one to look up to when shopping for fare

Another one to look up to when shopping for airfare called http://www.sidestep.com/air/; they will check all the airlines data bases for their lowest price for you.

 

[kismet]

Anything for international travel?

The lowest I've found from the US to Japan is IACE travel. Anyone else have luck with another site?