While taking road trips is fun, they’re not always practical. Long distances are not often reasonable any way other than flying. Good flight prices, however, tend to be elusive. Add in traveling with more than one person, and finding those prices becomes essential.
The Cookie Game
One of the most annoying factors in the hunt for good flight prices is the digital cookie game. Whenever we visit websites, they add little digital trackers to our browsers. As digital tracking becomes more advanced, these become more of a pain.
While we’re shopping around, we either must dump the cookie cache regularly or book as soon as we see the flight prices. Otherwise, the airline sites know we’re interested in a particular flight, which means they can raise the price on it when it’s shown to us again. Even clearing cookies or using the incognito browser mode doesn’t completely eliminate that.
Third-Party Services
Another option for finding flights are third-party services. These usually break down into two categories, searching and booking. The former type just finds good flight prices and sends out alerts. The booking services though take it a step further and help buy fares.
A searching site is one thing since we don’t buy directly from them. However, booking sites are a little hazardous. For those sites to be profitable, they have to take a percentage of what’s paid. Plus, booking with them means we sacrifice the airline guarantees like rebooking and points.
Airline Sales
One of the best options for good flight prices is to find an airline sale. These pop up periodically, or more than periodically, depending on the airline. If we’re willing to receive spam about other items, we can get the notifications delivered to our inbox. However, that doesn’t always guarantee the best deals.
Parting Thoughts
Regardless of which option works best for each of our trips, we always book through the airline itself. When we do, we fall into the airline’s carrier agreement, and not a third-party booking site’s. If something happens, that protection is invaluable.