Fare Trackers..How Helpful They Are..

I am bored out of my mind in this class. It should end in a half hour but I am doubting it with the pace the professor is going through the lecture. This has so far been the worst class for us at SLU.

Anyway, to pass the time, I wanted to share with you our current exploration of flight tickets to Europe for the latter part of August. Neeraj and I have been tracking various websites to find out the best rates.

Here are some of the good ones that also let’s you search for international fares:

I have stopped checking sites like Travelocity, Orbitz, Expedia, Hotwire, etc… They really don’t provide any good rates. Same for travel agents - Internet rates are definitely more competitive rather than going to a travel agent (my own experience).

With the crude oil price so high, you have to keep checking for prices. We have been checking since March - and really, we haven’t seen much of a difference. We do see that if we buy a month ahead of time, we will see some favorable difference, but nothing much more than that. Its crazy when traveling to Europe can be comparable to traveling to India

Today was the first day in quite some time that crude oil prices were down ($6 to be exact ), so Neeraj wants to wait to buy the tickets, and FareCast has reaffirmed his decision.

So if you are traveling soon, have a look at the websites above. They may come out handy for you. Right now I have them setup to send me daily alerts to let me know if rates are changing so that we can make a quick decision if we want. As a fact that I had read, fares usually change within 50 hours, so these alerts can come in very handy.

The other thing I have noticed is that its better to have flexible dates. We have fixed dates, and its guaranteed that we will pay more on the date that we want to leave rather if we would have left two days later. In our case, it doesn’t make sense to leave two days later because we are going on a long weekend.

Alvida. Jai Mata Di.