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Update December 9, 2007:
The freetraveling.com site is dead. So the list of promotional codes for American Airlines and other carriers, linked below, is down. However, there IS a 5% discount codes for American Airlines, as well as a discount for US Airways Vacations, in the 2008 edition of the Entertainment book, which may be a worthwhile investment.

The text of the original post follows, as originally published.

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The folks at FreeTraveling.com have compiled a list of promo codes (Edit: link is deleted, as the site is dead) for several U.S. airlines.

Most of the discounts are for American Airlines, but I found codes for Continental and Northwest as well.

To find your code, you need to select your destination city from a pulldown menu first. At this point, there are about 40 cities with promo codes.

Discounts aren’t always available for every time frame, much less on every airline, but it’s worth taking a look before you buy.

To use the codes, you may need to select “advanced” fare search options on the airlines’ websites. They don’t always make it immediately apparent.

Alternate way to get a discount: Buy an Entertainment book. The price of the book varies according to the “home” location, but each book contains a 5% discount code for American Airlines.

Many frequent travelers swear by ExpertFlyer, which lets you see the availability of each booking class, including some award seat booking classes. It’s a useful tool, but it’s not free.

Enter SeatCounter.

Admittedly, SeatCounter doesn’t have all the features of ExpertFlyer, such as actual fare rule information, but it DOES offer an overview of how many tickets are available for sale in each booking class. You don’t get price information, but you can see how many seats are actually for sale in each fare booking code.

For those looking to grab frequent flyer award seats or check the availability of upgrades, this is a particularly helpful site. You just need to know the letter to look for. That varies by airline, but SeatCounter offers some keys at the bottom of their results pages.

Tip: If you’re looking for a single airline’s availability, especially if looking for award seats, enter that airline’s two letter code TWICE in the “favorite airlines” boxes.

Reader Julie writes:

I’m looking to buy tickets from Newark to San Francisco for the holidays, and Expedia has the lowest price for tickets on United. (Even lower than united.com) Can I upgrade these tickets if I buy them from Expedia? Thanks!

You’re in luck! For travel within the United States, most every airline allows upgrades if the tickets were purchased from online agencies like Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz, CheapTickets, etc. As long as the booking class is legally upgradable, it doesn’t matter where you buy it.

(The exception: If you bought “opaque” tickets from Hotwire or Priceline, i.e., you didn’t select the airline and/or flight times when you made your purchase, then you can’t upgrade.)

For international tickets, upgrades are generally a little more complicated. Not all booking classes are upgradable, either with miles or certificates. But again, as long as the ticket you buy conforms to the upgrade rules of the airline, then it shouldn’t matter where you buy the ticket. As long as you are buying a “published” fare, you should be fine. (And even then: I’ve upgraded a ticket purchased from a consolidator. But it’s up to each airline to set such rules.)

Buy the ticket from Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, or wherever it’s cheapest. And good luck getting the upgrade!

P.S. In theory, you could buy the ticket from United and invoke their low fare guarantee by pointing to the lower fare on Expedia to get $50 in credit, but it’s probably not worth the trouble…
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Farecast, the service that seeks to predict the direction of airfares for the routes and dates you specify, is offering to sell you insurance for those predictions.

Ironically, this comes on the heels of the Seattle Times’ review of Farecast today. The newspaper found that the service was accurate in predicting the direction of fares in 61% of the searches queried. That’s below the firm’s target of 75%, but above my earlier (limited) assessment of around 50% accuracy.

So how does the new insurance/guarantee work? Much like buying a stock and purchasing a put option to protect you in case of a drop in the price, Farecast will sell you a “policy” when they predict the price will drop or hold steady. (If they predict the price will rise, then presumably you’ll be buying the ticket anyway. VentureBeat explains:

Let’s say you’re planning a trip, say to Kansas on Dec 5, and Farecast shows a low price of $210 and further, predicts prices are going to drop over the next few days. Now, rather than waiting, you can buy something called a “Fare Guard,” which lets you lock into any subsequent price drop automatically. Initially, the product will come at a promotional price of $1, but later might be priced around $10. Once you buy the Fare Guard, you have seven days to buy the actual ticket. If the price does drop, you get your savings. If it goes up, unexpectedly, you can buy the ticket, and Farecast will refund you the difference — so you win either way.

It’s an interesting idea, and the insurance is attractively priced (especially at the $1 intro rate). But remember, the contract covers THE LOWEST fare on the day you’re buying. Not the preferred time, airline, or connection. (Sounds like bidding for a ticket on Priceline!) There is thus a bit more variation and risk than first seems obvious.

The feature is still in beta, but readers who want to try it can participate in the test by clicking here and using one of the following beta-preview password combinations:

username: venturebeat
password: fareguardtest

username: johncook
password: fareguardtest

If you try it, please report back with your experience!

Maybe this will be the start of a market in a whole range of airfare derivatives. I’d like to short 20 Thanksgiving tickets to Los Angeles, sell puts on the July Paris contracts, and put a straddle on my December Newark itinerary.

Related:
- Farecast expands price predictions to over 50 cities
- Farecast beta goes public, just in time for a reader review
- So how accurate is Farecast?

Last week, I mentioned that Orbitz had removed the flexible search option from its website. It turns out that the search function has been hidden from the main pages, but it’s still on the sitemap, and you can reach it (for now) via this deep link. It’s one of the better search tools out there, so it’s good to have it back.

(Thanks to reader Tom!)

Why has Orbitz gotten rid of its flexible search?

I’ve put in a call to Orbitz to find out, and I’ll post the response when/if they respond, but the bottom line is, their once-powerful fare engine has been severely limited. You need to know specific travel dates to do their flight search. Thumbs down.

Orbitz runs on ITA Software code in the back office. It’s a really powerful booking engine that I often recommend (click “login as guest” to use free), since it lets you control the variables like no one else. Two other sites that use ITA, continental.com and the recently released beta-version of united.com, are both more flexible. So why is Orbitz killing this feature?

One alternative is to use an aggregator, many of which do have good flexible-date searches. Among the aggregators, I generally recommend Kayak (see April 2006 reviews here), which recently introduced flex-searches (registration required, though).

Another aggregator, PriceGrabber, has a decent interface, too. Alas, no flexible search, but they just added a neat feature: a list of amenities on each flight, such as seat pitch, in-flight entertainment options, in-seat power availability, and on-time statistics. On the searches I conducted, the amenity information was correct, even for many codeshared flights. The site still has its downsides — its results didn’t find the lowest fare on any of the searches I conducted — arguably the ultimate test of a fare engine — but it’s getting better!

Related:
- Disaggregating fare aggregators
- Disaggregating the aggregators, Part 2: Rating the hotel metasearches
- Online travel search improvements
- Flexible-date search alternatives for international destinations

Upgraded, eventually: Plane cleanliness on Delta
Investigative journalism at its finest: The NYT reports that planes aren’t cleaned as often as they used to be. What a surprise! Delta was letting as long as 18 months pass — instead of the traditional 30 days — between deep cleanings of its planes. Thankfully, Delta is going back to monthly cleanings. Hooray for the status quo.

Upgraded: Cheap fares between London and Hong Kong
Startup Oasis International Airlines, previously mentioned here, is officially starting service between London and Hong Kong at deep, deep discounts. $130 each way in coach, $850 in business, taxes extra. Great fare.

Upgraded, barely: United.com
United.com, long overdue for an update, is live beta-testing its new site. The changes are incremental, and nothing new for other airlines’ customers, but still mostly positive. Welcome to 1999! Positive changes: award search is better, with a full-month award availability chart, and you can change seats for booked flights. Negatives: You can seemingly only buy UA-coded flights, and the award booking engine still doesn’t cover partner airlines. Yawn.

Downgraded: Lounges at LAX
The couches and cocktail tables have given way for the wrecking ball. Lounges in the Tom Bradley international terminal at LAX were demolished, and all airlines’ customers are being herded into temporary mega-lounges (one for first, one for business). Moo.

Upgraded: Airline snack resources
Looking for more information about the minimal snacks on board flights these days? You’re in luck. CheapFlights has collected the price of ham sandwiches and gin-and-tonics on European airlines. Compare and save. And if you prefer the free bags of peanuts, pretzels, or snack mix, then you’re in luck. Someone has a review site devoted to these little freebies. Viva the internets.
(via Road Gladiator)

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I’m a fan of FareCompare’s fare drop alerting service, which I’ve mentioned before here. The alerts go out as soon as a lower fare is loaded into the system, sometimes several hours before it’s actually even available for purchase. That beats the pants off of Travelocity and Expedia alerts.

Until now, the problem was the volume of alerts. If you signed up for their e-mails, you’d get three messages a day, essentially one for every instance of new fares being published. If any flights, to anywhere in North America, dropped, you got an e-mail. That’s great if you’re completely flexible about your destinations, but really, how many people want to travel to Ketchikan, Alaska in November?

Now, finally, you can limit alerts to just those cities you want. Once you’ve signed up for alerts (see the box on the left side of their homepage), you can click “manage” and tinker with the settings. Big thumbs up on this improvement.

Google is apparently trying to poach some pennies out of the travel market. Entering a pair of cities in a Google search now outputs a small search box with links to the big online travel agencies. (pictured above) Clicking the default link sends you to Expedia.

You can also use airport codes for North American destinations. You’ll need to spell out the name of the international destination city.

Maybe this is old news, but it’s new to me.

But I’d still stick with the aggregators like Kayak, as reviewed here. You’ll get a much better overview of the fares available.

Reader AJ writes in. His question:

I would like to find an airfare search engine where I can put in an airport and see:

a) Where all the direct flights go and the prices for each.
b) specify “Europe” or “Asia” and see the best prices to countries in those regions.

Why you ask?
We frequently travel last minute, and frequently we do not care where we go, we just like to go. So if we have 5 days with nothing to do and want to go someplace, anyplace, in Europe it would be handy to see what the lowest price option is.

First off, I admire your flexibility, AJ. Way to go.

Your first criterion, finding only the nonstop flights from a particular departure point, is tough. Some search engines will let you specify nonstops only when you’re searching specific dates, but I can’t find a nonstop limitation on any of the broad, flexible searches I’m familiar with. (Other readers are invited to chime in with suggestions in comments!)

As for looking for the cheapest flight for ultra-flexible destinations, you’re in luck:
The two best options right now are offered by FareCompare and Mobissimo. Travelocity offers an option for domestic travel. ITA Software has a solution, too, but it requires more work and is not as flexible on dates. Here’s the breakdown:

- FareCompare offers a flexible destination search through their “Destination Deal Maps” in the middle of the page. Click on the continent you want, and a list of fares will appear. Clicking on a fare shows you the dates eligible for the fare. Pick a date, then an airline, and the system checks seat availability. FareCompare doesn’t sell tickets, so you’re directed to one of the major online agencies to close the deal.

- Airfare aggregator Mobissimo also offers a search like this, bizarrely located in the “activity search” tab. After selecting your departure point, you can select the desired continent from the pulldown. It’s odd to see “Europe” or “Africa/Middle East” listed as an “activity” right alongside “beaches,” “gambling,” or “opera houses.” But hey, the search works. Like FareCompare, Mobissimo doesn’t sell tickets, but directs you to the seller.

- Both FareCompare and Mobissimo effectively mirror Travelocity’s Dream Maps in format. But Travelocity recently neutered this tool for international travel searches. It still works well for domestic searches, and the site sells tickets directly. (The flexible international search was taken down because the fares didn’t include the fuel surcharges. See here for an explanation.)

- One final idea would be to use ITA Software’s search. ITA’s search requires you to input destinations, but it allows you to string a number of options together. For example, you could enter your departure city, then add a boatload of contending city names or codes to the destination field in the form. Say you’re interested in going to Europe, you could enter something like “ams;fra;par;lhr;dub;mad;cph;ath;rom” — a string of European cities’ airport codes, separated by semicolons. Then widen the destination search by using the pulldown menu to include any airport within 300 miles. Then click “more options” and uncheck “allow airport changes,” to make sure you arrive and depart the same city. That will pull in a LOT of destinations for the dates you want. ITA doesn’t sell tickets, and doesn’t point you to a seller — take your pick.

tags: travel | low fares | airfare search

A short write-up of around-the-world ticket options in the New York Times today, while generally good, left out some important options.

- Branch out. The article advises checking with the 3 big airline alliance websites (Star Alliance, OneWorld, and SkyTeam) to see flight options. That’s great, but don’t limit yourself to the alliances alone. Some airlines have side agreements outside their alliance that may be appealing, such as the Emirates/United round-the-world ticket.

- Talk to a travel agent. While many airlines can sell you the ticket, it’s often easier to deal with an agent for this kind of thing. Not every airline customer service rep knows the minutiae of round-the-world ticketing. I’d even suggest you talk to more than one travel agent, to compare pricing, routing, and heck, personality.

- Start in Sri Lanka. If you’re going around the world twice or more, consider buying the second (and third, etc.) ticket someplace like Colombo, Sri Lanka. I’m not kidding. You can buy a business class RTW ticket there for about the same price as a coach RTW ticket in the US or most of Europe, on the same airlines. The article mentions this, but it’s really worth driving home.

tags: travel | RTW | round the world tickets

A few nights ago, Rick Seaney, CEO of FareCompare.com, helped me bust the myth that Wednesday at midnight was the ideal time to buy plane tickets. Which led the Consumerist to throw down the gauntlet, demanding to know when the best time for ticket purchases actually IS.

Rick Seaney took their challenge. His answer, published in the Consumerist’s hallowed electronic halls, includes a detailed primer on the technical side of how airlines actually post their fares for others to see. Definitely worth reading.

Rick’s conclusion, though, is once again without a magic bullet. Shorter version: Get a feel for the historical price range for your desired itinerary and buy whenever it’s cheap. Use fare alerts to keep on top of price drops. Pull the trigger when the price is in the comfort zone. Don’t expect great deals more than 5 months before your flight date, or within two weeks of travel.

Rick astutely compares the price of airline tickets to the stock market. Like stocks, airfares run in a range, and they occasionally break to the downside — or the upside. If you’re really out to get the lowest airfare, you may need to take a stock trader’s perspective. (If anyone has figured out how to both buy low AND sell high in the air ticket market, let me know… Maybe the compulsive gamblers rational market economists at Tradesports.com, who seem to find a market/wager for any kind of world event, can figure out a way to make side bets on airfare…)

Added advice from me, for the truly hardcore: Even if you’ve bought the ticket, don’t stop tracking the fare. If your airline offers repricing or re-faring, stay on top of the fare trend and request a refund voucher if the price drops again. See my earlier post “The black art of repricing tickets.”

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tags: travel | low fares