Airfare- Money-saving tips and things to watch for

Most of the time, your airfare will be one of the biggest single line items in your travel budget. Getting a good deal on your airfare could make the difference between taking one trip this year or two, but the airlines certainly don’t make it easy.

Recently, a friend of mine was booking a flight on Delta and she found that she was able to select her seats if she purchased the tickets as a guest on the website but not if she logged into her Delta account and purchased her tickets. I am inclined to believe that this was a bug in their software, but the only way it could have happened is if they make a distinction in how they process the data for logged in users and for users who are not logged in. I can’t think of any good reason to do that, so it makes me wonder what else they’ve changed in the software that we don’t see because we assume that it all works the way we want it to. But her story reminded me of my experiences with airfares. (cue Scooby Doo doodle-oo doodle-oo doodle-oo flashback music)

When I was pricing airfare for my trip to Italy last year, I found something similar. As you may know, a round-trip fare is not always twice the cost of a single leg. On rare occasions, you can find two one-way fares that are less than the round-trip fare. But more likely, the single leg fare is more than half the price of a round-trip. This may not matter if you’re going from City A to City B and back to City A. But for my trip, I was going from Washington DC to London to Venice to Naples and back to DC. Since some of those legs aren’t available on major carriers, I ended up booking most of them as individual legs, which is where it got interesting.

For my DC to London one-way flight, I found that the airfare was $1,400. But if I booked a round-trip from DC to London and back, it was only $1,300. Same outbound flight details, but adding a return leg dropped the cost of the ticket by $100. I’m not a math major, nor do I study business logic, but that doesn’t make any sense to me. When I booked my Naples to DC leg, I found the same thing, but much worse. One-way from Naples to DC was $2,200, but the round-trip fare was $700. Seriously, it was less than 1/3 of the cost for me to fly more. The Naples to DC leg was exactly the same, and I booked a convoluted route from DC to Naples with multiple stops to get the airfare as low as I could (what do I care? I wasn’t flying that leg anyway). But just by looking at round-trip fares instead of one-way fares, I was able to save $1,600 on the airfare alone. My Jamaica trip last January was roughly $1,100 including airfare, accommodations, meals, drinks, and everything, so I paid for an entire trip with those savings and I still have $500 left over (I’m thinking about getting a surround sound system for my home, not that it’s relevant to this article).

Most major airlines have policies prohibiting this kind of booking. If you book a leg, they want you to take it. But they can’t stop you from having a last-minute business meeting that causes you to miss your flight. Or who could have predicted that unfortunate case of food poisoning that delayed your arrival at the airport? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Here’s the important part: If you skip one leg of your flight, most airlines will cancel the remaining legs that are on that ticket. So if you book a round-trip ticket when you only need the one-way, make sure the leg you want to take is the first leg, not the last. If you need to book another leg on that airline, do it with a separate ticket and a separate confirmation number, so there’s no chance of it being canceled automatically.

With airlines adding more and more fees for nonsense, keeping their other fees (there’s still a fuel surcharge on your ticket even though oil prices are at their lowest point in 15 years), and not having intelligent and open ticketing rules, there’s no reason to not look for a deal when you can find one. It’ll take you a little extra time, and it may start making your head swim after a while, but I’m sure you could find something good to do with a few hundred extra dollars in your pocket?