I have been searching the internet and came across a web site that I would like to know more about. Has anyone heard of skyauction.com? and has anyone used it and how the trip went? Are they on the up and up - prices sound very good/as well as the vacation packages. Thanks

I have been on this site many times, however, I have not seen that great of deals. I place bids, but the winning bids always seem to be higher, if not the same price as buying the tickets from a travel agent. I wouldn't count on finding deals through there site. However, check out www.thedailyauction.com <BR> <BR>you can find REAL deals there. I have bought tickets through travelocity, bestfares, and tiss. <BR> <BR>tiss.com was the cheapest lately. Bestfares used to be. But I haven't seen that great of fares. they all have the usual .com address. Hope this helps.

I check out skyauction a couple of times a week, and absolutely love it. I have recommended it to several friends, and they are hooked. I think that sometimes the prices you get on airfare only deals are not much cheaper than you can get elsewhere. What I have found is that the package deals with hotel and airfare tend to be good bargains, although it depends on where you are going. I did go on a trip I won through them last spring and everything was fine. The flight was on TWA, and we even got upgraded to first class because the flight was full. The hotel was quite nice, as well. A friend of mine is going to Italy next month on a skyauction trip. Another friend of mine went to France this winter through skyauction and said it was fabulous! They both got those trips much cheaper than they would have through a travel agent or booking it themselves. There are some tricks you need to learn to use the site, and do your research on hotels before you bid. That way, you won't be surprised. Hope this helps.

This may add nothing to Cindy's response, but I bought for my son and his wife for an October 3 trip. They leave from Denver to Paris on NW Airlines. I got the tickets for $561 including tax which was at least $300 cheaper than NW was quoting at the time. Perhaps I could have saved a bit by buying them elsewhere (I am handicapped by living in a midwestern city that doesn't have great air transport), but I'm leaving from another midwestern city and wanted to fly as far as I could with them so needed NWA and needed the tickets early. The tickets arrived in a timely fashion. I have no complaints so far, but we have not yet taken the trip. The one thing that was a bit nerve-wracking is that I had to be on-line bidding the last hour or so before the auction closed.

Boots, one trick I have learned that seems to work for me so far is to put anything I am interested in on my auction watch, and not to begin bidding on it until the last day. I check every couple of hours or so, and go back on about 15 minutes before the auction ends to see if I want to make final bids against someone else. May or may not work for you.

Cindy: Your suggestion sounds good. I will do that next time. This was the first time I had tried it and I made a major boo-boo and hurriedly e-mailed them to see if they could correct it. They did, and I was grateful, so that made a good impression on me.

Cindy: Would you elaborate on those tricks/tips?

I've bought many tickets from skyauction.com. Some areas get better deals that others. Skip the flights from the U.S. to London. You'll get cheaper from the airline. However, flights to the rest of Europe tend to be good. <BR> <BR>DON'T BID UNTIL THE LAST 15 MINUTES! I learned the hard way, but at least I learned after only one experience. The earlier you bid, the more you'll drive up the price, because some other inexperienced bidder will bid a little higher than you did to get back up on the leader board. <BR> <BR>My hints--don't start bidding until the last 15 minutes. Set an upper limit for yourself in CONCRETE, and remember to include the tax (which for overseas flights is often at least $100/ticket). In the heat of the moment, you'll find yourself wanting to win, damn the cost, and end up spending a lot more than you had planned. Make sure you read the trip description carefully before bidding, particularly your first time. Some are just flights, some are just hotel rooms, and some are full packages. Also, make sure you want to depart from and arrive in the cities mentioned. If you have to pay and of the add-on fares, you might as well buy it direct from the airline, because it will be cheaper. <BR> <BR>One note of caution--I did have trouble with them the last time I bought tickets. They charged my credit card twice for tickets, so I ended up with an extra $848 on my credit card. They also went ahead and charged me $95 for a connecting flight, when all I did was inquire about the price of the connection, and made it clear that I was not purchasing the connection, just asking about. To their credit, they corrected the mistakes as soon as I contacted them, but I still wasn't happy about nearly $1,000 in extra charges on my credit card bill.

I agree that you should not bid until the very last minute. Do your homework by finding out airfares before you bid. I, too, have found airfares not that great at the auction. Packages look the best. <BR>Good luck.

I bid on SkyAuction for a while and they ripped me off (in my opinion, I'll explain) although I've heard from others that did fine. From the rules, I could not figure out why anyone would ever bid before the last 15 minutes, there is nothing to gain from it at all; those familiar with the site never do. I was bidding on RT midwest to El Salvador and they do have good prices on flights to Central America, one of the few places to do that. I have not seen good deals on flights to France, for example, many people seem to bid as much or more than you can get from a regular airline, they don't know what they are doing. If you truly want to win, know your limit and use the automatic bidding option and turn it on just in the last ten minutes or so; if you don't, others who do will win as the traffic gets busy and you cannot submit your own bid in the last few minutes and I think they give automatic bidders preference. Anyway, after several weeks of fooling around with this, I managed to submit a winning big one minute before the bid closed and I was the top bidder -- I waited and waited and never heard from them so I looked at the item the next day and they had somebody else as the winner who bid maybe one dollar over me except the time of that winning bid was clearly marked as AFTER the bidding closed, about 2 minutes. Well, as I had lost several times by hitting the submit button a minute or two before closing and it not going through due to being busy, I knew that every time I got a message back telling me that my bid was too late, that bidding was closed (even when I submitted it before closing, I guess it didn't get through for a minute or two after)-- so I wanted to know how come this other joker won my trip when the time was even officially recorded after the close. I emailed Skyauction several times to ask them to explain this situation and they never even responded. So, good luck, I just think it's hard to really win and that it may even be fixed if they want someone else to win (like their own employee, you'd never know), that's what I was suspecting. They also do have some minmum threshold (which you figure they would have to), and if no bid goes above it, nobody wins, but they won't tell you what that threshold is, which I also don't like. My winning bid was very low and I wondered if they just didn't want me to win but want people to participate and think they can win, so will make it look like someone else has won over you even when it's not a real person. Well, I'm just speculating, as I said, but I didn't like it and I had never seen that on any other item where the winning bid had an official time AFTER the close.

<BR>upupupupupupup for Terry!