Finding Lowest Air Fares

It takes me hours to search all the options to find the lowest fares
from say London to Paris. Are there any sites that will do this for me
and make the booking as well where I can be sure to have got the
cheapest available?

There are hundreds of consolidators and major agencies which negotiate their
own price deals with airlines and other travel vendors. Each of them
develops their own approach to making that inventory available online, how
and where. Roughly ten percent of the world's airlines operate their own
database and therefore will not be accessible via the central reservation
systems that the majority subscribe to. Then there are charters.

I doubt that a sole source will ever be developed which will be able to
access every available online database so we're all sorta stuck in the same
canoe here. As a general rule though, if you shop at least 5 independent
online resources, you will have a fair picture of available flights and
fares. In terms of time, somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes should be set
aside to shop a given itinerary.

And whenever free time (whatever that is) is available, do a little research
and become familiar with which sites are doing what and what their values
are. That way, you'll already know which sites to start with when shopping a
given itinerary.

Happy shopping.




"Jon" wrote in message
om...
It takes me hours to search all the options to find the lowest fares
from say London to Paris. Are there any sites that will do this for me
and make the booking as well where I can be sure to have got the
cheapest available?

Hilary wrote:
It takes me hours to search all the options to find the lowest fares
from say London to Paris. Are there any sites that will do this for me
and make the booking as well where I can be sure to have got the
cheapest available?


Why not call/email a travel agent and get them to search for you?

How many hours is a travel agent going to search for a fare from London
to Paris?

It takes me hours to search all the options to find the lowest fares
from say London to Paris. Are there any sites that will do this for me and
make the booking as well where I can be sure to have got the cheapest
available?

If it were me I would look at these two sites:
www.opodo.uk
for the major air carriers and
www.applefares.com
for the point-to-point discount carriers.

If you do not actually LIVE in the U.K.(or central Europe), however, Opodo
will likely not be able to sell the ticket to you. Though one time I had
good luck finding Opodo-listed fares on Expedia, whereas other U.S.-buyable
sites did not have those fares.

It takes me hours to search all the options to find the lowest fares
from say London to Paris. Are there any sites that will do this for me
and make the booking as well where I can be sure to have got the
cheapest available?

Listen.. In my experience, you book the cheapest fare available and pay for
it, and soon as you CC has been hammered, you check again and a cheaper
fare/and/or/ a better fare/airline turns up.

Every time


"freeda" wrote in message
...

It takes me hours to search all the options to find the lowest fares
from say London to Paris. Are there any sites that will do this for me
and make the booking as well where I can be sure to have got the
cheapest available?

Listen.. In my experience, you book the cheapest fare available and pay
for
it, and soon as you CC has been hammered, you check again and a cheaper
fare/and/or/ a better fare/airline turns up.

Hilary wrote:
It takes me hours to search all the options to find the lowest fares

from say London to Paris. Are there any sites that will do this for me

and make the booking as well where I can be sure to have got the
cheapest available?

Why not call/email a travel agent and get them to search for you?


How many hours is a travel agent going to search for a fare from London
to Paris?


It takes a travel agent less time to search through a CRS than it takes
you to search through websites.

What do you mean. I thought TA's normally just looked at one location,
like Sabre?