Where To Look When You Want To Travel Smart

Summer is drawing near. Now is the time for me to dream again, as I do every year, about the places that I wish I could visit. Sydney, Paris, and Seattle to name a few. Even if I lack the finances and time that would allow me to take a trip, I can easily search for flights from my windowless office through the Internet. Familiar with online travel agencies are frequent travelers and these have made it possible for traditional travel agents to travel more with time on their hands.

Lesser known are the travel search engines that check multiple sites at once and can uncover Web specials and airlines that the big three online agencies might miss. To check four of them out, I searched for 11 imaginary trips through Labor Day. The search engines typically gave me the best fares. If you are planning a recent trip to San Francisco, search engines can bring you to the airlines’ Web sites for direct booking without fees so that you need not pay the service fees charged by most agencies. In many cases, the agencies’ fares are only a few dollars pricier after the fees are added.

Prohibiting the multisite engines to search their sites, two major online travel sites provided me with the most inexpensive fares. Here, availability and prices can change without warning. Aside from searching each trip twice, checked within five minutes of one another were all seven sites. According to most online travel agencies, they can provide clients with better customer service and even package deals with hotels and so they should not merely judge by price.

One out of the rest of the agencies was extremely flexible. What you can find is a two to four day trip between July 15 and Aug 3 apart from the cheapest weekend trip in June. Taking specifications for infant in lap or infant in seat was this site while two other agencies only sold tickets for adults, seniors, and minors.

Although I did not search for cheaper fares from nearby airports or dates, all three sites alerted me to these. From one of these sites came about a nice calendar showing fares for the entire month. In one occasion, I was looking for departure times but there was one agency that sorted everything out by price. The way the company sorts their flights is by price and wading through cheap afternoon flights does me no good especially when I need to be there for a 9 am meeting.

Aside from being very flexible, one search site offered more options. What I was able to search for when it comes to this company was multicity as in New York to Chicago to Boston to New York and so called open jaw trips flying from New York, but returning to Boston. Similar to other agency sites, it uses email fare alerts too. A feature limited to the agency sites started by them was a beta test for flexible date searching up to three days before or after.

It was user friendly. Multicity searches were permitted by four sites but this one automatically filled in the next box. It is possible to use tools for narrowing, expanding, and comparing flight results with these sites. After you remove a check mark next to an airline all related options disappear. Adding flights from a nearby airport is something you can do not to mention remove all evening flights.

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