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Thursday, December 3, 2009

Book Cheap Air Tickets: A guide

Planning a vacation? Looking for cheap air tickets online? Not sure where and when to buy air tickets? Here’s a quick guide to finding the best deals on air tickets. 

Do a quick research on the place you are traveling to. Check the best time to visit and the peak season for your destination. A good resource for this information is Frommer’s and lonely planet.
There are a couple of good sites that offer cheap air tickets. You can go to these sites and start looking for air tickets.
Some of them are:
Airfare     Cheapoair     Expedia      Priceline
A quick way to find cheap tickets is by using an air ticket search engine. They search all the above sites for your choice of destination and give you the best deal available. One of the most popular air ticket search engine is Kayak. Just enter your origin and destination and it will search Hotwire, Airfare, Priceline, Expedia and Travelocity for you and list the search results from all these sites based on your criteria like non-stop flights, travel times etc. It also gives you an option to search for hotel reservations, car rental locations.

Other similar search engine is Sidestep and Farecompare.
This is the best way to start looking for air tickets as it saves a lot of time.

Some tips and tricks:
Clear browser cookies:
Some travelers have complained about airline sites tracking the browsing history of customers and hiking up the prices based on it. So it is better to clear your browsing history now and then to avoid these airline sites from sneaking on you.
You can read more about this here. 
Deals and Price tracking:
You can also look into sites like Airfare Watchdog which provides a regularly updated compilation of the best air ticket deals online. 
Also a more intelligent way to look for cheap air tickets is to use the price tracking option provided by Yapta. Here you can input your origin and destination location and search for air tickets. Then you can select a bunch of air tickets and choose the ‘Track Price Drops’ option and wait for the prices to drop. Yapta will track these prices for you and send you a notification when prices drop.

Another similar feature is provided by Bing Travel search engine. You can search for air tickets and the search engine will provide you a prediction of when the prices are going to drop. Now, you might doubt the prediction accuracy of the search engine, but surprisingly the predictions are  found to be 74% accurate. You can read more about farecasthere. technology used by Bing travel

Author:RSB

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