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https://www.going.com It's more curated than a basic search engine, but you can set your home airport and sign up for email notifications. They usually have a little write-up on why it's a deal.
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May 28, 2023 23:33
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Fitzy Fitz posted:https://www.going.com This is only for the US, btw.
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May 28, 2023 23:40
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We're looking to fly to Taiwan in late October (we have to be there for an event on the 28th, and home by the end of the 30th, but we're flexible besides that) for a week or so from Madison WI (which usually means O'Hare). I've set up flight alerts on Google Flights and things are currently looking like ~$1100 per person with EVA Air. We're open to flying to other destinations and connecting, but I doubt there's any sort of big gains to be had there. So basically, how does that price sound for a cross Pacific trip? Any advice as to when a good time to buy for a trip in October is? And least importantly, any experience with EVA air? Oh, also, should I set up alerts anywhere besides Google Flights? Grumpwagon fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Jun 13, 2023 |
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Jun 13, 2023 02:07
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I've only heard good things about EVA, meaning that it's affordable without being lovely. $1100 is a great price for transpacific right now.
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Jun 13, 2023 06:59
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I've done an EVA flight from TPE to HKG and it wasn't bad at all. Not sure how their long haul product is these days but coach is coach. And yeah, that's a good fare and a lot cheaper than what I've seen for TPAC recently.
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Jun 13, 2023 14:04
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Looks like my wife and I were just the victims of a creative bait-and-switch scam. Posting here to vent and let other people know about this tactic, but if any readers know of a recourse we could pursue, I'm open to trying. 1) Used Google Flights to identify a reasonably good deal on Milan -> JFK round trip tickets for 2 adults with ITA Airways. 2) Google Flights redirected us to ITA Airways' website to enter passenger info and confirm purchase. 3) we confirmed all the details for 2 passengers that we were happy with, baggage, seats, etc. non-refundable economy tickets. 4) entered payment info and hit submit 5) was emailed a receipt and booking confirmation for my wife only; card shows charges for 1 ticket only 6) call customer support to ask what happened with my ticket, was told that they can see my passenger information but a booking number & ticket weren't generated. assured that they can process my booking over the phone 7) customer service agent tells me the price to book my ticket is now over twice what my wife paid. agent responds by quoting T&C, that prices are dynamic, etc etc, while I simultaneously checked online, seeing only the higher prices online 8) given that my options are to either to wait to see if the price dynamically changes downward or taking a different flight, I caved and so we ended up paying like 58% more than what we thought/planned afaik EU flight regs only apply to ticket holders, and since my wife was a ticket holder and I wasn't, I didn't have any claim to damages for the price difference. I think because I panicked and bought a ticket, I consented to that price, T&C, etc so I'm SOL. anyways I'm very angry on a beautiful saturday afternoon gently caress
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Jun 25, 2023 14:41
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I don't know if it's possible to travel without being ripped off somehow. It took me a year and a literal act of Congress to get a refund from Air Canada a few years ago. Currently I'm waiting for two tickets to be refunded that I cancelled in February.
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Jun 26, 2023 16:54
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That’s really odd. I’ve never pressed buy for two tickets and then only received one, on any carrier including ITA. Sounds more likely to be a bug that went against your favor rather than a scam bait and switch. Sometimes bugs go in your favor, apparently this time it didn’t. I got a seemingly-bugged ticket for a flight to Japan this summer that was like half price when made through booking.com instead of from the carrier’s website, for instance. What I’ve seen occasionally is Google Flights saying one price and then the price being totally different when you click to buy. Not super often, but often enough to be annoying.
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Jun 26, 2023 18:37
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Hong Kong is offering free airfare to boost tourism. (If you're living in specific regions, offered by 3 different airlines with different rules.) Basically you book tickets to HK and then payment is $0. https://wow.hongkongairport.com/tickets
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Jun 26, 2023 23:36
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webcams for christ posted:anyways I'm very angry on a beautiful saturday afternoon gently caress Agree with others that you probably didn't get scammed but were more likely victim of a bug in their booking engine. I can see a scenario where there was only one seat left in the fare bucket you were looking at and some busted rear end business logic booked a single ticket with that seat but FUBAR'd the rest of it. That's speculation on my part, though. Fitzy Fitz posted:I don't know if it's possible to travel without being ripped off somehow. It took me a year and a literal act of Congress to get a refund from Air Canada a few years ago. Currently I'm waiting for two tickets to be refunded that I cancelled in February. This is because Air Canada is staggeringly lovely at everything other than their flying product. I also had problems during that period and they refused refunds, defied the DOT order to process refunds, and were general dicks about everything. A DOT complaint and a credit card chargeback solved all the problems for me.
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Jun 29, 2023 00:59
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Beef Of Ages posted:A DOT complaint and a credit card chargeback solved all the problems for me. I filed a complaint with DOT and tried a pretty extensive chargeback process with AmEx, but nothing came of it until the Canadian government forced them to give me a refund. Assholes
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Jun 29, 2023 02:16
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peanut posted:Hong Kong is offering free airfare to boost tourism. My friend and his GF recently won these tickets through Cathay Pacific. They said it's "free" but have to pay taxes which is around $350 each. Still a nice price for a round trip ticket to HKG from Europe but since they are pretty tight on funds, they are considering not using it.
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Jun 29, 2023 21:42
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That's always how 'free' tickets work.
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Jun 30, 2023 08:12
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I just got back from 2.5 weeks in Poland, Hungary, and Austria. I had a similar thing happen with a train ticket purchase at Warsaw's central station. I bought my gf and I two tickets for the next day to our destination (small town) and then two more tickets for our next journey from said small town to Krakow. The kiosk accepted payment for both itineraries but only printed out the tickets for the next day's trip before the machine promptly stated it was out of paper and rebooted. Like we got to see the Windows 8 splash screen and all that jazz and then nothing else but a black screen. We waited upstairs in the lengthy queue for ticket purchases with a human, because the PKP customer service office that was referred to on the kiosk was not open 24/7. The windows were fogged up and could tell the office was closed for renovations. I tried to explain our situation in slow, clearly enunciated English and even used a scrap piece of paper but to no avail. $25 down the drain. I had to use spotty free wifi in that small town to order tickets on my phone the next day. Never again. I will purchase all tickets in advance and print off the tickets before leaving.
Ferdinand Bardamu fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Jul 7, 2023 |
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Jul 7, 2023 15:56
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UK goon here. Am looking at going to Chicago and another US destination soon, for simplicity lets say New York, any insight I might have missed on if it's better to fly to NY, then on to Chicago and fly home from there, or to NY and then get a return domestic trip to Chicago from there, and fly home from NY. I've tried a few things in Skyscanner, and it looks like doing the transatlantic portion to NYC both ways plus return domestic flights is quite a bit cheaper, but I have to look at overheads on how I do the connections, basically if I travel into NYC on arrival and stay a night before heading out again. If anyone has done this kind of trip and has suggestions I'd be greatful.
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Jul 8, 2023 02:29
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BizarroAzrael posted:UK goon here. Am looking at going to Chicago and another US destination soon, for simplicity lets say New York, any insight I might have missed on if it's better to fly to NY, then on to Chicago and fly home from there, or to NY and then get a return domestic trip to Chicago from there, and fly home from NY. I've tried a few things in Skyscanner, and it looks like doing the transatlantic portion to NYC both ways plus return domestic flights is quite a bit cheaper, but I have to look at overheads on how I do the connections, basically if I travel into NYC on arrival and stay a night before heading out again. If anyone has done this kind of trip and has suggestions I'd be greatful. When you say NY, do you mean JFK or EWR (Newark)? It can make a difference based on what you want to do in New York. But in general, you can do a multi city ticket into New York and out of Chicago, but fares will likely be different than a simple round trip into New York. If you have dates I can take a look at total price options which would include flying between NYC and Chicago.
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Jul 8, 2023 10:38
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BizarroAzrael posted:UK goon here. Am looking at going to Chicago and another US destination soon, for simplicity lets say New York, any insight I might have missed on if it's better to fly to NY, then on to Chicago and fly home from there, or to NY and then get a return domestic trip to Chicago from there, and fly home from NY. I've tried a few things in Skyscanner, and it looks like doing the transatlantic portion to NYC both ways plus return domestic flights is quite a bit cheaper, but I have to look at overheads on how I do the connections, basically if I travel into NYC on arrival and stay a night before heading out again. If anyone has done this kind of trip and has suggestions I'd be greatful. Just to make sure: are you looking at a multi-city (traditionally called "open jaw") ticket, or did you look at two one-way tickets? Two one-ways is usually way more expensive than a multi-city / open jaw. I do multi-city flights almost every time I go back to the US (e.g. fly to NY, train to Boston, fly out of Boston; fly to SF, drive to LA, fly out of LA) and it's not a significant price difference, and can even be cheaper than a normal roundtrip.
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Jul 8, 2023 11:03
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Saladman posted:Just to make sure: are you looking at a multi-city (traditionally called "open jaw") ticket, or did you look at two one-way tickets? Two one-ways is usually way more expensive than a multi-city / open jaw. I just put it into Skyscanner so I think it's giving me open jaw results, is that his you book them? Looking to be in Chicago 10-15 August, NY after.
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Jul 8, 2023 12:10
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BizarroAzrael posted:I just put it into Skyscanner so I think it's giving me open jaw results, is that his you book them? I haven’t used sky scanner in years - I use google flights now - but yeah that should be right if you are searching a single time for multi city. Note that you should generally do two searches and not three in your case: * a multi city search for your flight from London -> NYC ; Chicago -> London * a one way search for your flight from NYC to Chicago You could put it all on one search but IME that tends to make it more expensive than buying one multi city itinerary plus one one way since it locks you in with big carriers that do the transatlantics and using a LLC on the internal flight is usually a much better deal.
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Jul 8, 2023 12:51
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Saladman posted:I haven’t used sky scanner in years - I use google flights now - but yeah that should be right if you are searching a single time for multi city. Note that you should generally do two searches and not three in your case: Yeah I've found that and I'm not sure why that is, besides that if I have Premium economy on the transatlantic flights it seems I can't set the domestic one to be economy.
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Jul 8, 2023 13:23
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BizarroAzrael posted:Yeah I've found that and I'm not sure why that is, besides that if I have Premium economy on the transatlantic flights it seems I can't set the domestic one to be economy. First point is usually because if you take e.g. Virgin Atlantic for the London - NYC and Chicago - London flights, then you are locked into someone on their shared carrier system for the NYC - Chicago flight if you get it on a shared ticket. So this means you'll never see like, a JetBlue ticket in such a system (i.e. booking all 3 flights together on one itinerary) because they don't do co-ticketing. Some carriers do but LLCs often don't, and even for which major carriers will share ticketing, it's opaque, at least to me. Probably there is some specific list you could find out. Second point, travel agents can do this and I've seen some carriers offer it separately (e.g. Swiss) but yeah it's not super common to be able to easily set like, business class one way and economy the other. I'm not even 100% sure you can book it directly like that with Swiss, but rather after buying a ticket you can then pay to upgrade each leg separately, or at least it was like that pre-COVID. I've only done 2 long haul flights in the last 3 years so I haven't really looked at class upgrades since idgaf about my seating situation for flights under like 4-5 hours. I'm pretty average height though, someone over like 185cm would pay more attention than I do to flight classes. IIRC Beef of Ages is tall, or one of the regulars in this thread is, anyway.
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Jul 8, 2023 16:32
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I ran across a really weird system to upgrade to business class in Aegean, they have you "bid" on the upgrade and let you know later if you got it (presumably based on how much people were willing to pay above some minimum). Seemed like an interesting novelty so I put in ~100 euro for a 2 hour flight, and a few days before the flight got an e-mail it went through. Worked out really well actually since I had to kill a bunch of time at the airport and the tickets came with lounge access, then a hot meal even on the short flight. Avoided some luggage fees too. Purchasing the upgrade directly would have cost several times that and I probably wouldn't have even considered it. Never flown with Aegean before, is this new? Any other airlines doing the same thing? AreWeDrunkYet fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Jul 8, 2023 |
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Jul 8, 2023 17:50
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Never flown with Aegean before, is this new? Any other airlines doing the same thing? I had the chance to do that with my flight into nyc with ITA Airways but I was too salty to even look into it. I just checked for my return flight and the minimum bid to upgrade to business class JFK->Milan is €910,00 lmao and €310 minimum bid for premium economy
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Jul 8, 2023 18:08
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I've been doing upgrade bidding with Air New Zealand since at least 2015. Also Aegean specifically almost never book out their business class so I usually bid 30E or so and it always goes through.
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Jul 8, 2023 20:25
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Saladman posted:First point is usually because if you take e.g. Virgin Atlantic for the London - NYC and Chicago - London flights, then you are locked into someone on their shared carrier system for the NYC - Chicago flight if you get it on a shared ticket. So this means you'll never see like, a JetBlue ticket in such a system (i.e. booking all 3 flights together on one itinerary) because they don't do co-ticketing. Some carriers do but LLCs often don't, and even for which major carriers will share ticketing, it's opaque, at least to me. Probably there is some specific list you could find out. Ah I see, I thought Skyscanner would just sell a bunch of separate tickets as needed. I've previously done a return to Seattle plus return from there to Vegas and open-jawed Vegas and NY and in both cases got better value buying the domestic flights separately. The open-jaw was through an agent rather than the airline so I had assumed they would just also book a separate domestic flight.
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Jul 8, 2023 21:08
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:I ran across a really weird system to upgrade to business class in Aegean, they have you "bid" on the upgrade and let you know later if you got it (presumably based on how much people were willing to pay above some minimum). Swiss does it this way too, which is how I knew you could upgrade each leg separately. Maybe also Lufthansa since Swiss is part of Lufthansa?
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Jul 8, 2023 21:39
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I saved $1000 taking Amtrak instead of flying from DC to Chicago. It was a very American experience for my kids, with crazy people yelling bible numerology at the station, Amish families in the train dining car, friendly passengers in front of us, and gorgeous farmland scenery.
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Jul 9, 2023 07:12
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BizarroAzrael posted:I just put it into Skyscanner so I think it's giving me open jaw results, is that his you book them? Friends don't let friends book through travel portals; use them to find good fares and then book directly with the airline. You don't need a third party in the way if something goes wrong with the trip. Beyond that, if you're willing to make the hop from wherever you are in the UK over to Dublin, you can do DUB-ORD//EWR-DUB for £302 on your dates which is a pretty good fare. It looks to be around £490-£510 to leave out of London, some of that being the UK departure tax. So the question is whether or not a savings of around £200 is worth it to get to Dublin on a separate ticket. Also it looks to be around £100 to fly between Chicago and New York on Sunday the 15th. It will be slightly less if you go on Monday the 16th.
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Jul 9, 2023 12:52
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Saladman posted:First point is usually because if you take e.g. Virgin Atlantic for the London - NYC and Chicago - London flights, then you are locked into someone on their shared carrier system for the NYC - Chicago flight if you get it on a shared ticket. So this means you'll never see like, a JetBlue ticket in such a system (i.e. booking all 3 flights together on one itinerary) because they don't do co-ticketing. Some carriers do but LLCs often don't, and even for which major carriers will share ticketing, it's opaque, at least to me. Probably there is some specific list you could find out. Yeah, I'm approximately 198cm tall and like 3 billion cm wide so I pay very close attention to upgrade strategies in order to have a seat I fit in and don't bother anyone else. Most carriers can sell you multiclass tickets these days after investment in the capability to do so; Lufthansa offers this on their website so I'm assuming Swiss does because they share the same IT backend (just like Delta does with Virgin). The "ticket sharing" stuff you're referring to is called an interline agreement between airlines. You can interline passengers and/or bags, and with that comes the option to codeshare (e.g. associate a Virgin flight number to a Delta-operated flight) which is an approach to marketing fares. Most airlines keep that within their airline group (Star Alliance, SkyTeam, and Oneworld) but there are notable exceptions, especially for smaller national carriers around the world.
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Jul 9, 2023 13:02
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peanut posted:I saved $1000 taking Amtrak instead of flying Ok sure but it took you 18 hours instead of 90 minutes. For most people, including myself, time has a value. And there is little aesthetically redeeming about Indiana farmland.
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Jul 9, 2023 13:03
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Beef Of Ages posted:Friends don't let friends book through travel portals; use them to find good fares and then book directly with the airline. You don't need a third party in the way if something goes wrong with the trip. Thanks, worth exploring flying from Dublin, been meaning to go anyway. Starting from London Skyscanner gives me £66 for a flight from Chicago to NY on the 15th , I think you're looking at the wrong month as the 15th is a Tuesday. It also gave about £680 for the open jaw London to Chicago and NY to London (about the midpoint of the return prices to each), through a travel agent, but if I put that into BA's own site I get £1236. I actually say's there's nothing on offer for the 10th and gives the 13th instead. So unless someone can make sense of that I'm booking through that agent.
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Jul 9, 2023 13:11
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BizarroAzrael posted:Thanks, worth exploring flying from Dublin, been meaning to go anyway. Starting from London Skyscanner gives me £66 for a flight from Chicago to NY on the 15th , I think you're looking at the wrong month as the 15th is a Tuesday. It also gave about £680 for the open jaw London to Chicago and NY to London (about the midpoint of the return prices to each), through a travel agent, but if I put that into BA's own site I get £1236. I actually say's there's nothing on offer for the 10th and gives the 13th instead. So unless someone can make sense of that I'm booking through that agent. Doh, my bad. I read you post and thought October, not August. It's definitely going to be more expensive since you're in peak travel season (before Labor Day in the US). I found a hidden city ticket on your dates for £610, DUB-ORD//EWR-LHR-DUB where you drop the LHR-DUB segment (don't check a bag) which is bookable on the BA website, and the EWR-LHR segment is a day flight which is the only humane way to commercially fly from New York to London.
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Jul 9, 2023 13:23
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Beef Of Ages posted:Doh, my bad. I read you post and thought October, not August. It's definitely going to be more expensive since you're in peak travel season (before Labor Day in the US). I found a hidden city ticket on your dates for £610, DUB-ORD//EWR-LHR-DUB where you drop the LHR-DUB segment (don't check a bag) which is bookable on the BA website, and the EWR-LHR segment is a day flight which is the only humane way to commercially fly from New York to London. I always preferred overnight going east, but when you say don't check a bag, it wouldn't be an option? Or could I notify them and they'll send my bag to the carousel instead of transfering it to the Dublin flight?
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Jul 9, 2023 14:03
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BizarroAzrael posted:I always preferred overnight going east, but when you say don't check a bag, it wouldn't be an option? Or could I notify them and they'll send my bag to the carousel instead of transfering it to the Dublin flight? You must be able to sleep better on planes than I do, heh. You cannot check a bag on a hidden city ticket. They're technically against the contract of carriage and the airline doesn't want you to do it because they make less money that way. EWR-LHR is more expensive than EWR-LHR-DUB because fares are sold based on market, not segment. EWR-DUB has different pricing that EWR-LHR and the fare is sold without direct regard to the fact that the passenger is actually flying EWR-LHR-DUB. It is almost certain that BA would not short check a bag to LHR for you.
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Jul 9, 2023 16:01
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Beef Of Ages posted:You must be able to sleep better on planes than I do, heh. Probably yeah, going west I find I can just power through the extended day, in fact first time I went to NY I struggled to get to sleep at a respectable time EST, just watched Rogue One then Thor: The Dark World, which if you've seen it you'll understand saw me off. Going east in the day just means I can't sleep and get really messed up the next day. I'm probably going to need a larger bag but I'll quickly try to size up my cabin-acceptable case. Edit: lol, when I said earlier the open jaw was twice as much on BA.com? Was actually my turn to get the month wrong, I was asking for July, as in a day or two from now. Edit edit: spent £10 to hold tickets from and back to London whilst I decide, I'll explore Dublin options though as I'd like to go there even if it's only for a day or so and I'll have to hop through Heathrow just to go back there. BizarroAzrael fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Jul 9, 2023 |
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Jul 9, 2023 21:53
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I'm looking to travel to Japan next summer and was directed here. The question I had is if there's any tips on getting airfare for next July for the trip like..how far ahead should I book a flight? I'll be flying out of the mid west USA and all so I ask you if there is some tips and tricks y'all might know. TIA 
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Jul 22, 2023 22:29
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Good Listener posted:I'm looking to travel to Japan next summer and was directed here. The question I had is if there's any tips on getting airfare for next July for the trip like..how far ahead should I book a flight? I'll be flying out of the mid west USA and all so I ask you if there is some tips and tricks y'all might know. TIA Usually you can’t buy tickets a year in advance but normally the earlier the better. Usually it’s pretty static in price from like 11 months to 6 months out. We’re in Japan right now and prices definitely started climbing a lot by late March when we bought tickets compared to late Nov when we first drafted our common dates and late Jan when we confirmed our common vacation time. Anything under 1k from west coast or Europe is good, anything under maybe 1.3k from east coast is good. I think cheapest I saw from west-central Europe to Tokyo was via Frankfurt for like $900, I ended up buying out of Zürich for $1100 but I think I got an error fare through booking.com as the same ticket (direct) through Swiss was 1800 when I bought mine, and it was around 1500 for a direct booking when I checked in Jan. There are other tricks like hidden city ticketing which can work out but are a hassle to figure out, usually requires a lot of trial and error, although I think there are tools to help with that. Sometimes they can save a lot in high season travel. In non-high season I’ve never seen hidden city tickets be worth it. E: skiplagged, that was it. https://www.going.com/guides/what-you-need-to-know-about-hidden-city-ticketing for an intro to hidden city ticketing.
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Jul 23, 2023 10:11
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I doubt hidden city tickets are worth it for international flights since you have to book one-way, and that's usually much more expensive.
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Jul 23, 2023 12:13
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Konstantin posted:I doubt hidden city tickets are worth it for international flights since you have to book one-way, and that's usually much more expensive. It can be, like I did a few years ago Rome - Nairobi - Geneva - Rome and then skipped the Rome leg was way cheaper than Rome-Nairobi-Geneva, like 1000 vs 1500. I wanted to be in both Rome and Geneva before and after. Midwest of the US might be a lot harder to figure out a good deal. I’ve actually only ever looked for international, since flights within Europe and the Mediterranean are so cheap it’s usually not worth the bother to even look. Flights in the US are way more expensive per distance covered though.
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Jul 23, 2023 14:50
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I've found that search for long, international flights to obscure destinations can yield super crazy fares that might be less if you look for each leg seperately. My parents are trying to book a flight from Florida (Jacksonville or Orlando, if necessary) to Punta Arenas, Chile, which is at the very southern end of South America. For this kind of itinerary, are there still travel agents that can do some kind of wizardry to give you a cheaper flight, or is what you see on kayak/google flights really about as good as anyone can do? And sometimes you just have to book seperate legs if that somehow gets you a cheaper fare?
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Aug 8, 2023 23:27
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