Does Priceline usually save you money on air fare?

i have tried it but i’ve never found a better price there than i have with southwest.

That’s funny…I usually find really expensive air fare on southwest…

it just seems like any time i am looking for flights, i can find one way from anywhere to anywhere for around a hundred dollars, and the same for the returning flight if i need a two-way

My wife is pretty good about finding really cheap airfare. She’s gotten the best deals direct from the airlines and through specialty travel agents. The two times, that I know of, where she’s tried priceline we’ve done better direct.

She suspects but has yet to confirm that they might be better for last minute travel deals.

Does anyone have any tips on buying air fare? How far in advance should I buy? I search around a lot and usually Travelocity.com gives me cheaper deals than the rest. I find that leaving on a Wednesday is cheaper than a lot of other days.

Don’t travel on Monday, Friday or weekends. We’ve had our best luck, planning well in advance. Fly stand-bye if you can afford to wait.

I just hate how it’s so expensive to travel =(

Yep, it’s why when we go to asia we never go for less than a month, airfare is just too high otherwise. We’ve started doing random domestic trips based on who’s got a really good discount going when we feel we want to get away for a long weekend or so. Traveling light helps too, no baggage fees always a plus.

thats another thing i like about southwest. your bags are free. so if you’re gonna check 2 bags, that saves you…what, $50 already?

Oh and don’t be afraid to change destination airports. If you’re renting a car the drive can sometimes be worth the difference in price. It’s changed since I’m sure, but I used to fly into Sacramento instead of SF all the time because it saved me about $125 on the ticket and made for a nice, relaxing, afternoon or evening drive.

I’m 21 so I don’t know if I can rent. I’m looking at Southwest and it’s a lot more expensive compared to other sites. Maybe I just don’t know how to look at it right.

You gotta do a lot of online research and you’re definitely better off dealing with the airlines directly and using promo codes ,if you know someone who does a lot of business travel you might ask them for their company code !
Remember as much as a good deal as you might get from travel agents & online travel agencies ,,they still get their cut !

I’ve never used a travel agent, how do I find a good one? Just whitepages? haha

travel agents usually just make things more expensive because they have to get paid too.

I wouldn’t use Priceline for air travel—I believe (not 100% sure) that if your flight gets cancelled or changed it’s really difficult to get a refund. Plus, you’re almost certainly guaranteed a stopover.

Priceline for hotels, however, is the best-kept secret on the internet.

No, Priceline has never had the best price or me. There are likely many variables involved, though.

It used to be cheaper to go with travel agents because they had special connections with the airlines and could find you secret deals they didn’t post online. So, for many years, I would check fares online, then call a travel agent, and sure enough, the travel agent would have a much better fare.

Now that the internet has gotten so popular and travel websites have evolved, it seems to be a better deal to find your own fares on the internet because the secret low fares now seem to be published online. The travel agent generally charges a fee or a commission, so doing it yourself eliminates this extra charge.

Now, I usually have to book one international flight a year and I’ve become pretty darn good at finding cheap fares over the years. I’m pretty jazzed that the online airfare sites have evolved in a positive way that makes it much easier than previously, to find the best deal.

I have never used Priceline for airline tickets and I don’t know anyone who has, so I can’t comment on that. Their format before kept me from investigating further, but they may have changed things since.

You can use a site like FareCompare.com to compare multiple sites at once, which is very handy. In addition, I highly recommend signing up for fare alerts at any site you can, one that I use is TripAdvisor. You can sign up to be notified when fares drop from a certain airport (and if you have multiple airports in your area, I would sign up for all of them).

Play with your dates. Some days of the week are more expensive to fly than others (Tue-Thur is generally the cheapest), not to mention different times of the year (peak holidays). I find that generally you get much better deals if you book well in advance, but if it’s a flexible thing, you may just want to sign up for fare alerts and nab a cheap ticket when it comes up.

As a little sidenote: For awesome air-fare deals check out www.kayak.com. It checks all airlines, as well as the other sites. Also there’s all different kinds of fare charts to show you when the cheapest time of the month is to fly!

I’ve used it several times and the most it’s ever saved me is the tax or airport fees compared to Orbitz, Expedia, Hotwire, Kayak, Cheap Tickets, etc. Jet Blue and Southwest still offer good deals but only to particular airports and their listings don’t come up on the multi comparison sites.