BootsnAll Travel Community

I find that airline consolidators (though hard to find are often the best). I booked a ticket from Chicago to Beijing and Bangkok back to Chicago (open jaw) for just under $950 USD including all taxes and service charges. The website is www.travel-depart.com. However, it seems a bit sketchy as you can't actually buy a ticket online. But, you email what you want, or call and it works. You'll get a paper ticket in the mail and it's a good, normal ticket. I highly recommend this site for international travel.

Otherwise, I've always had luck just looking at websites in the area to get good deals. Another trip I took was Chicago - Los Angeles - Fiji - Sydney - Hamilton Island (Whitsunday Islands) - Sydney - Chicago all for $1400 USD. But, that was on Southwest, then Air Pacific, then two different domestic Australian airlines, etc.

Sometimes you find where you're going and then google airlines in the area. For instance, it's cheaper to fly across the Pacific from LAX than Chicago, so take a domestic flight to LA first.

These are my new top three faves: (I think most useful for really frequent, particularly, US-based domestic travelers):

Excellent website for finding hard to find/unadvertised frequent flyer promotions. I just found this - AFTER I had already booked three different tickets that could have yielded me an additional 15,000 bonus miles on United - had I registered beforehand!!!
Mile Maven: Frequent Flyer Promotions and Programs

FlyerTalk, especially the Miles and Points forums. There's a lot of really great information on these forums... offered up by some really serious points-jockeys...
FlyerTalk

The following website is so useful, especially for business travelers. It also has a button you can install on your google toolbar with a drop-down list of updated airport (trouble-spots) information - I find myself checking it compulsively, even when I don't have a flight scheduled:
FlightStats: Track Flight Status, Airport Delays, etc.

For traveling to or from the US to Europe I've found the best trick to be purchasing a round trip flight on something like expedia, orbitz etc. out of New York and using a local carrier to get around from there, smaller cites and vacation type destinations often have higher prices when flying from oversees. They don't fly to as many cities as some other airlines but Jet Blue has good prices from JFK or La Guardia in New York to several popular places in the states but you've got to book them on their own site ( jetblue.com ). For Southern CA they fly to Burbank and Long Beach not LAX, but Burbank is actually closer
to the city and the little Long beach airport is so cute.
Important to remember- If you book the 2 flights separately on separate carriers you will need to tranfer your own bags so leave a little time between flights

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Kelkoo yet with their lists of cheap flights. It includes Ryanair and other cheap budget airlines. You can look for hotels and hire a car at the same time as well if you fancy.

I also try to use Kayakand Skyscanner when looking for even greater comparison. What would be really useful would be a search engine that searched all the search engines...is that possible?!

http://www.flyertalk.com Has some good message boards and alot of postings about deals on various airlines.

I want to go to Switzerland around the 1st of June next year, when will be my best time to start looking for a plane ticket?

A website that shows where the "turbulence" may be on your flight today...

Turbulence Web Site

Here's something you that might be useful. It's a simple search gadget for your personalize Google home page if you have one.

Basically go here and add it to your google page, and then you can search airfare direct from there.

If anyone's saving up ff miles for their next trip, and already has some flying planned in the next couple of months, American Airlines is letting people earn twice the miles for their flights between April & June. (likely they're throwing a bone out to everyone after their operational meltdown last week). Looks like this works for flights previously booked but not flown yet as well.

You'd just go to aa.com & register for the promo in the "AAdvantage Bonus Offers/Airlines" area.

For those thinking of coming to Australia, we have a new budget airline called Tiger Airways Apart from QANTAS, which has a monopoly on flying to/from Alice Springs, Tiger fly Melbourne to Alice Springs. Our other budget airlines are Jetstar
and Virgin Blue.

TIP: Seats are released approx 10 - 11 months prior to travel and cheapest seats are available then.

School holidays are busiest usually 2 weeks in:
March/April (dependent on Easter), June/July, and September/October. Christmas holidays from 20th December to about 31st January.

Peak season for tropical areas ie Darwin, and Cairns is June - August.

Hey guys, I haven't seen anyone else post about this here, so i thought I would. In searching for cheap ways to get to Europe from the States I came across a company called Airtech (www.airtech.com) And basically you buy standby passes, call Airtech the day before you want to leave, and then they'll get you a flight within the next few days (5 max I think). It's got really low rates, like $269 per person, and I was wondering if this is legit, and if anyone else has had any experience with them. I know one of the concerns for some people is the uncertainty about when the flight leaves, but that's not really a concern for me. Any info would be appreciated.