ttt for later perusal

I wouldn't recommend cleaning out the cookies to anyone but an expert, as most cookies benefit the user, and unless you can identify the specific cookie and somehow find out that it is giving you artificially high prices, I think cleaning them out would do more harm than good. Frankly, if an airline is in the business of selling tickets, I think they are unlikely to install some malicious cookie that will give you a higher price, because most people will have shopped around and found that a lower price is available elsewhere.

I think many of us inadvertently have our computers set to show the last copy of a frequently visited website; that gives us an illusion of speed, as its a lot quicker to call the site up from memory than to get it over whatever your connection is; the easiest solution to this is to reload or restore the website, depending on your browser, which forces download of a current issue.

Places like orbitz and expedia often list an abnormally low price, but often there is only one ticket available at that price, so if you prospect for one ticket, like the price, and ask for two, it will come up with a higher price.

I think staying up until midnight Tuesdays to get a low price will not produce reliably lower prices. First, with airlines headquartered around the world, the obvious question is midnight where? Second, some airline may first release tickets at midnight Tuesday, their time, ten or eleven months before the date of the flight, but I would wager my teeth that not all of them do, and wager my paycheck that they alter prices more frequently than once a week.

I recently reserved tickets at a given price, which means I had until midnight, their time, of the next day to confirm my purchase at that price, or lose it. I checked the flights between my destinations the next day, and some had gone up and some had gone down. I waited until that evening and checked again, and again the prices had changed. Since my favored routing had not come down enough, I went in to confirm my reservation, and when I did, they told me the price had gone down, but I had the option of paying the reserved higher price if I wished. Some decisions are easy.

Getting the best price is a lot of work, and I wonder if saving $20 on a ticket, given the time you have to put in to find the price, and the possibility that it will disappear before you can nail it down, is worth it. If course if you look long enough (perhaps a few years), you can get a sense of when and where the lowest fares usually show up, which can help you in your current search. Over the years, I've found that summer fares are usually higher, so I look for late spring and early fall fares. I've also seen that tickets bought very early (say 8 or 10 months before the flight) are usually not discounted, while fares bought a few months before the flight are often heavily discounted. And some airlines seem to have sales on a recurrent basis in every year; I think SAS almost always has a sale around the holidays, for example. Of course, predicting future behavior from past is never certain, as the airlines are always looking for new marketing gimmicks.

I agree with clevelandbrown here about cookies. Cookies (nowadays) are more to your advantage than theirs. I'm not sure cookies affect prices. For one thing, they can still have your shopping searches saved on their server with your IP address, so deleting your cookies would be useless. And, I've shopped on a variety of computers (home, work, laptop) within hours with no apparent discrepancies. Cleaning out your cookies can be very inconvenient for you afterward. I love the sites that "remember" the last itinerary you shopped so you don't have to fill out the screen again.

I find that each trip is an entirely new endeavor. If airfares have gone up $100 over the year before, it's probably unrealistic to "hold out" hoping for last year's fare.

Because our dates are never flexible and we like only non-stop flights, and we're fussy about seats, I don't like to wait too long. I typically book no later than February for May, June, September. I've never found a lower fare (including all those e-mail specials for "as low as" that come up the same or more for our dates/flights) after booking. But, I do shop like the dickens before booking.

In the overall, I've found the lowest fares in November and February (maybe the airlines need to improve their cash flow those months), but you just never know.

Thanks for the advise re. cookies...yes, Cassandra, it's as clear as mud. But I appreciate the effort. And as cleveland brown pointed out, sometimes the time spent is questionable re. the money saved, but I think of it as a "game" and try to have fun with it...maybe I'll "play" on my comptuer and when I'm ready to get "serious" about buying, go on to DH's that won't have the past cookies re. the current flights? Or whatever...

I just booked two tickets from JFK to Paris (RT) on 5/26 on 1800flyeurope.com for $640 each this morning on American. They were even cheaper than airfare.com which I thought was pretty good at $746 It was an absolute pleasure doing business with them.

Ellie

Thank you for sharing the efforts of your hard work with us, Whitey. I think it is going to help me quite a bit.

Topping for Meichx

We just helped a relative buy a domestic ticket. The best price was on one of those big search engines. Within 24 hours of ordering, we had more spam than we ever had on that email account. We also had 2 Visa offers within 3 days of ordering, in our relative's name.

We had ordered online before and never had this issue come up. I realized we had always gone through the airlines directly. In future we'll use a yahoo or hotmail account for this purpose....

Comparing airfares between popular city pairs is one thing but another to dynamically mix and match the flights of all airlines to find the best route. This is what the latest flight search engine called www.dohop.com does for more than 660 airlines. Check it out.

Thanks for the site Kaldi. I tested DoHop.com and it did not even come close to the pricing I am getting for Bos to CDG from other search engines. I will continue to explore the site so I can better evaluate its efficiency, but for the moment my favorite sites for US to Europe airfares are 1800flyeurope, airfare.com, mobissimo, sidestep, onetravel and cheapinternationalflights.com

Looking at some of the replies here, it appears I did good on my airfare to Amsterdam. Of course, I'm flying at the end of the low season.

I really can't afford a trip to Europe, so to make it happen I had to be very smart about hotel and airfare. Also, because I live in California, it's more expensive than the east coast. This is what I decided to do:

I used 25000 frequent flyer miles from LAX to Newark (non-stop). Then, I found a flight on Continental for $411 total roundtrip, non-stop to Amsterdam. I think that's a really good price. If I didn't use the frequent flyer miles, my trip would have been about $700, in that case, this trip would not be happeneing.

The way I search is usually Travelocity first, then the lowest there, I go to that airline. SOme of those travel sites have GREAT deals, and some charge service fees.

I'm happy with Continental. I fly them to the East coast. They still provide free meals, good service, and good planes.

The sites mentioned in the original post do tend to be the best. I generally use Travelgrove.com which searches all of these website. I flew in May 2005 Rome-Detroit for $320 r/t from one of the websites searched out by travelgrove. I highly recommend it to all of my friends.