Between search, meta-search, customer review sites, aggregators, OTAs and everything else the internet can throw at us - it’s actually getting harder to make travel arrangements on the web.  What??  What I mean is, the more information to sift through, the harder it is for most people to make a decision on what to buy.  It’s a fact that when faced with an overwhelming amount of choices, many people opt for no choice at all.

Airfare, however, still seems to offer limited choice - and therefore should be simpler to decide on.  And it is, for the most part.  Generally, from most cities, there are 1 or 2 choices that fit my schedule and my budget.  But if you’re a flexible traveler, how do you decide when to travel and when to buy your ticket to ensure that you get the best deal available?
Here is my method:

  1. Search for my ideal travel dates in Orbitz, using flexible dates to see the fares for the days around my ideal travel date.
  2. Pick the best rate that works for the day(s) I need to be in my destination.
  3. Make sure that if I’m staying an extra night at the destination that the extra hotel night and/or expenses don’t exceed the extra cost of traveling on my ideal travel day.
  4. Proceed to the airline’s own website to book the ticket directly and thereby avoiding the $5 service charge (and possibly getting some bonus miles in the process).

The thing my method doesn’t account for is knowing WHEN to buy the ticket…  2-3 months out is usually not possible for most business travel.  I just finished a book where the author recommends only booking 4-5 days out and using Orbitz pricing to determine where you should start bidding on a Priceline (Name you Own Price) ticket.

Farecast.com gives you a recommendation of when to “Buy Now” or “Wait”, but it doesn’t really give you a flexible dates option.  I recently ran across flyspy.com (beta) which let’s you look at rates on a graph for up to 30 days and lets you adjust for day and length while highlighting the lowest fare. But it doesn’t really give you an idea of what the fare may do if you wait to buy your ticket later (like farecast).

It seems to me like there is an opportunity for a main-stream air-only search engine that encompasses the best of these two models.  However, with little or no commissions given on air-only bookings, a revenue model might be difficult to come up with.

How do you find the best deals on airfare?  Let me know in the comments and maybe we can create an aggregated list of sites and/or suggestions…


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