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How Often Can You Trust Air Travel Deals Advertised on the Internet?

By on Monday, October 25th, 2010 | 1 Comment

When USAir advertises fares at $100, but when they balloon to $300 when you try to take advantage of them because of the taxes and fees, does that count as advertising fraud? When at any miserable dive in America, they feel free to add on a resort fee to the advertised room rate, are they really allowed to do that? When in the papers they have air travel deals advertising flights to Europe starting at $129, should they be forced to make good on their promise? Travel articles that dispense advice on how to save money traveling, always tell you to sign up for e-mail alerts from all kinds of travel services for discounts and deals there might be on offer. The question is though, how do you know that those deals are real and not just teases? The language used in those offers are always about caveats like 'available for certain destinations' or 'offer subject to availability'. Jet Blue Cheeps are its offers put out on Twitter. They usually advertise a handful of seats, and announce the deadline. As time goes on, the available seats run out. But JetBlue offers are usually advertised for the number of seats available clearly shown. Most travel deals advertised will be available on certain dates alone. Where companies try to make it look like their deals are available for a longer time than they really are, that is where they cross the line. If those dates are listed at all, they'll usually be buried in fine print at the bottom of the page. If a company doesn't make it clear without sending you to the fine print section the dates on which a deal is available, youI should probably leave it alone. Consumer forums around the Internet are rife with complaints over how travel websites refuse to publish taxes and fees, and how they refuse to make it easy to find out the timeframe air travel deals are available in. They do this because it's cheap advertising for them this way. In general, offers on hotel stays, unlike air travel deals, are likely to be more worthwhile looking into. And that would be especially true of advertising done by a particular hotel as opposed to advertising done by a travel website for all hotels in the destination. Advertising by a travel website usually is less reliable than advertising by a specific airline, hotel or anything else. For instance, when a travel website advertises a car rental rate of $15 a day over a weekend, that usually doesn't include major destinations like LA or NYC. When a car rental agency like Hertzf makes such a claim, it usually includes every single major city. The only consolation here is that bait and switch ads are nothing new to us. We have had these on flyers and newspaper ads forever. It's just that e-mail and the Internet make it much easier for them to go back on their word. Mouse here for Related LinksCVS Deals and Coupon Match Ups 8/28 – 9/03Arab Locate

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Air Travel’s Getting Expensive – Care to take the Train?

By on Saturday, July 17th, 2010 | No Comments

If you fly regularly at all, you know that air travel no longer has anything to do with glamour, comfort or even fun. If you were pressed to describe the experience, you probably use words like over-priced, noisy, crowded and rude. But there seems to be hope at hand; the Transportation Department is on the problem, and has put together a panel of influential people (they've put together a representative group with people to speak for the airlines, the consumers, the visionaries, the policymakers ) to try to find a way to turn things around for air travel. Certainly, they've put together panels before; but this time it looks like they mean business. And their first order of business - making sure that the airlines are forced to hire and maintain a competitive maintenance staff for their aircraft; the kind of impact airliners have on the environment is going to be looked into, and airlines that are forced to resort to every cost-cutting measure to defend their bottom line, are going to get a little help with their finances too. Reporters and journalists were allowed to watch and ask questions of the panel; it provided everyone with a real idea of what the future of air travel was meant to be. The smaller low-cost carriers like Southwest and JetBlue, are seen to be the feeder services that will fill up the planes the big boys fly internationally. If you live in a small city anywhere across the country, you can expect air travel to become more expensive; if you live in a small town, you can expect your regional airport to not have as many services, to have lots of cancellations and delays all the time because they'll only be flying small aircraft that will be shut down by any kind of storm. If you live in a small town, you can expect your area will fall by the wayside as far as air travel opportunities are concerned. International air travel doesn't better; all the big carriers have joined hands, to achieve all kinds of great coordination and efficiency; but since all the big carriers are working together, they'll make sure that the prices don't slide. There's less competition now. The one area where you have good news is when you travel from one major American city to another on the routes served by the low-cost carriers; the prices are rock-bottom now and forever. But while air travel in general is getting more expensive all around, there are other ways of travel opening up - for instance, and the government is really keen on high-speed rail travel; it is handing out billions of dollars to companies like Amtrak, to make it happen. Think maglev and bullet train. As the cost of fuel rises, and they consider putting a major petroleum safety tax on your gas (after the BP oil spill), airlines are just going to stop making money anymore. As much as they raise their fares, they barely break even. It isn't good news either that the European Union and other authorities are planning on slapping a carbon emissions tax too. Sure, going back to rail travel does seem like a step backward. But it's much cleaner, and it's nearly as quick. Mouse here for Related LinksHow to Rank Higher in Google’s New Search Engines – iHost Webhosting Websites SEO PanelDidn’t Travel This Summer? Five Trips To Take This Fall!15 Kinds of Alternative TravelIf You Are Posting To Free For All Sites You Should Not Waste Your Time

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Does Your Travel Website Tell you the Whole Story About Your Air Travel Deal?

By on Monday, July 5th, 2010 | No Comments

An airtravel deal isn't just about what you pay for your ticket; what does one say about a ticket that's worth what you paid for it? Certainly when you need to fly, you want a reasonably low-priced ticket, and a nonstop flight would be preferable; but the other half to getting a "deal"would be getting some quality for your money - getting legroom, convenient times, and efficiency in baggage delivery. Now what if there was a flight search service that could actually look up deals for you in the fullest sense of the term - not just something that could shave $50 off your ticket price? There is one now; it's been testing for a couple of years now, and has finally launched, ready for prime time. It's called InsideTrip.com; and it is a service that searchers and ranks airline deals on 12 quality parameters. InsideTrip works in partnership with Orbitz; when you search on InsideTrip for an airtravel deal, it supplies you with the best overall deal it can find with its information from Orbitz, and quality information from its own research; and then it will send you over to Orbitz to buy a ticket, when you have made your choice. The information you get on InsideTrip is delightfully more complete than anything you'd find anywhere elsewhere. As you would do on any other flight booking website, you pick the route you want to travel and the number of travelers you need to buy tickets for. There are a couple of extra fields that appear here too: how many bags you expect to need to bring to check in, and what you expect to eat or drink on the flight (these will be added to the ticket price so you have a better idea what you will end up paying). Actually, to add on all charges you will be expected to shell out, is a pretty good idea. Once it has everything it needs, it puts out a regular list of all the flights they have, with ticket prices and flight quality ratings - your total air travel deal. Flights are rated on how long they take, how punctual they are, how long you need to wait at security check to be waved through, the kind of aircraft they have, how crowded the flight is, and the convenience of how close the departure gate is. Whatever parameter is important to you, you can make sure that the system weighs it that much higher than the others. The airtravel deal system just got a whole lot more sophisticated; with the summer travel season upon us, travelers making travel bookings have no way of knowing through the traditional websites what kind of travel horrors they'll be subjecting their families to. Here is an indication of how anxious people are for such a service - in the two years the service was in beta, millions of travelers used the incomplete system they had to gather information and make bookings. It'sis a great way to avoid all the aggravations modern airtravel has saddled us with; so technology has finally found a way out of a problem technology created in the first place. Mouse here for Related LinksBest of the travel deal sitesWin A Hawaiian Vacation With Hi-Lo for HawaiiKayak Offers Deals On One-Way Fares From Separate Airlines In Roundtrip Flight SearchHotel TipsLast Minute Travel Package DealsHurricane Travel Tips for Irene WeekendLooks Like Bing and Twitter are Renewing the Search DealHow to Deal with Bizarre Content Requests [...]

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If you Have Air Travel Miles, Upgrading Just Became Much More Fun

By on Monday, June 14th, 2010 | 1 Comment

February and March - the time of the year when lucky business travelers all over the country who have just made it to their airline's elite status, sit down to total up (and not to mention gloat over and brag about) their incidental earnings in qualifying air travel miles; and when they dream about all the upgrades they look forward to. But they can gloat all they want; people just have more miles now that they can use these days. It all began last year; lots of airlines thought they could earn their premier customers' custom by letting them qualify for miles when they shopped at specific stores or used specific credit cards. Everyone took this bait really enthusiastically. So now, if you earn your elite stripes the old-fashioned way putting in some hard flying all around, you'll be sitting next to people who can just earn miles using their credit card to gas up. Why is this a problem? On lots of domestic routes, you'll only find small regional jets usually, that don't even have first-class. That the airlines just hand you free coupons for products that don't exist for most of the time, you could be forgiven for thinking of this as a sneaky trick. Especially when you learn that of the handful of seats that they do have to go around, airline employees have dibs on them most of the time. So this is the way it is going to be for anyone who wants to redeem qualifying air travel miles for elite first-class seats, now, and over the next couple of years. If you aren't near the top of the elite program on your airline, the best those miles can do, is set you up for a good case of the "if onlys'. Airlines normally have at least three levels to their elite flyer programs; and if your airline is like Continental, there'll be a new high level, a fourth one, like the Continental Presidential Platinum Elite. Typically, only one out of a hundred frequent flyers qualifies for elite programs on any airline; But they've been really handing out those bonuses recently, and those elite lounges are soon to be bursting full with five times as many members. With this many people fighting over the few seats that are available on their air travel miles, actually getting a choice seat can descend into undignified clamor. There are all kinds of factors that affect who gets an elite upgrade and who doesn't. If for example, you have been buying full fare coach tickets, the airlines want to show you their appreciation, by bumping you up over all the other elites. But if the next guy happened to pay $10 more on his tickets than you, well, he gets ahead of the line. If you happen to be a low- ranking elite, you may or may not get an offer - just the day of your flight. If you are a higher-ranking elite, you could be given three days' notice. Sometimes, you can find yourself standing right at the check-in counter, glancing at the screen to see if your name's being announced for an upgrade. There's a lot of smartphone Internet traffic that is generated by people who are just trying to check when they get to go, over and over again. At least the airlines are beginning to return some dignity to the affair, by publishing an upgrade list. Airlines should just realize that they can't dangle this "incentive" or "reward" before you and have you snapped at it like a hungry animal, I didn't feel any gratitude to the airline in the end. That is just not how people work. Mouse here for Related LinksUS Airways Grand Slam (Up to 110,000 Bonus Miles) Promotion Registration Now Open – View from the WingBest of MJ on Travel – Alaska Mileage Plan – Marshall Jackson on TravelJell-O, Cool Whip, Philadelphia Cream Cheese, Baker’s Chocolate three Books in 1: Favorite Desserts Cookbook, Cheesecakes and Much more Cookbook, [...]

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Last Minute Air Travel Can Be Expensive or Cheap

By on Monday, June 14th, 2010 | 1 Comment

Every now and then, I will have to book a flight on short notice to some city where I have to do business, and what I have found is that last minute air travel can be expensive, but it can also be cheap if you keep your eyes and ears open. I recently had to make a trip to Denver to meet with a colleague about a proposal we were working on, and because he lives in San Francisco and I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, we decided to meet halfway. I figured that I was probably going to end up spending an arm and a leg to get out there. I looked through some old Travelocity e-mails that I had in my inbox, and found one with a trip to Denver that still had one day to book, as long as I traveled within a certain time frame. As it happened, I was traveling at the time that the deal was for, so I went ahead and tried to book the deal. Now, this is not always a sure thing, because I've tried it before where those tickets have all been booked, even though I was still within the window to order tickets. Since this was last minute air travel, I realized that I may not get them, but there were still tickets available, and at a good price. I ended up paying just under $300 for a a round trip, which was a quite a relief. On the other hand, when I was in college about 14 years ago, I spent a semester studying abroad in England, and I got a very good deal when I went because, number one, I was going to be there for a long time, and secondly, I was traveling at a rather unpopular time of the year to be visiting England. I became very good friends with a man named Damion while I was over there, and it just so happened that he and fiancée decided to push up their wedding to two weeks after I had returned to the United States. He e-mailed me and told me that he would really like for me to be there, and because this was last minute airline travel, and international travel at that, I knew that I was going take a big hit to my pocketbook. As it turned out, it ended up costing me about $400 more to go back than it had on my original trip to England just five months prior. He offered to pay the difference, but we were friends and I knew he really wanted me to be there, so I told him not to worry about, but I was surprised there was such a big difference in price. Last minute air travel can be costly, but you can also find good deals from time to time because not enough people are traveling on a particular flight. I have experienced both situations, and it really just comes down to how much you pay attention to the best deals possible. Mouse here for Related LinksCheap Flights to Tenerife- Fly To Tenerife With Cheap AirfaresLow-cost Last Minute Weekend BreaksTop 10 Travel Tips To Help You Book A Dirt Cheap FlightLast-minute push to avert PA UN bidBest of the travel deal sitesHotel TipsRoadtrip Planning: How Much Is Enough? Too Much?Highlights Of Sydney & Thank YouTripping

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