Online Travel Booking Bargains

When it comes to booking air travel, most of us know to research and compare online for the lowest air fares. The best discount deals are definitely online - you just have to be enterprising and patient enough to find this form of travel bliss.

If you’re looking for the one site that always sells the best air fares, wake up, dear traveler - you are searching for an artificial paradise. The best strategy is to shop around different Web sites. Because we are all time-crunched, this can seem like a drag. But you do not need a travel agent: the good news is that there are some ways you can make it easier on yourself while hunting around.

All it takes is plugging into some free and new online tools designed for the budget-savvy traveler. www.SideStep.com and www.BookingBuddy.com both give you the power to see results from multiple sites for convenient comparison shopping. Air fare, hotel, cruise and auto booking information are all available at these sites. They’re free, fun and easy to use for locating the sweetest air fares, etc. Then again, booking at the source (an airline’s Web site) can also be a fantastic way to ferret out drastically reduced airfares. Here are some tips that will help you save time and money while booking.

SideStep is in effect a travel search engine. It chugs around the Web scoping out the best-priced air fares. You must download free software to use it, but the process takes just a few seconds. SideStep becomes an icon on your toolbar and BookingBuddy operates much in the same way without downloading any software. With Sidestep and BookingBuddy, you can also compare multiple auto rental prices, cruise and hotel rates. Another advantage offered by BookingBuddy is their free email newsletter which keeps you abreast of travel bargains on a weekly basis.

Then again, it is also true that sometimes it’s best to buy airline tickets at the airline site rather than using an online agency such as cheaptickets.com, Travelocity or Yahoo. This is because you will save the booking fee charged by the online agency and harvest the frequent flier miles for booking at the airline’s site. So, remember to do your research to find the best fare, then click on the airline Web site to book that ticket and rack up those frequent flier miles.

For example, airlines such as United and US Airways frequently offer double or even triple-miles bonuses for online booking. US Airways recently offered a knockout deal. For a New York to Los Angeles round trip, an approximately 5,000 miles distance, you could earn 15,000 frequent flier miles. This means you’d would have acquired enough miles to be more than halfway to earning a free ticket (typically about 25,000 miles). Regarding international travel, I once found a round-trip Los Angeles to Christchurch, New Zealand flight at www.airnewzealand.com that cost $350.00. Yes, you read that correctly.

In other words, anything can happen when you do your due diligence by researching air fares online. Here is to a well-priced and safe journey!

written by kyle roderick