My husband and I travel every summer.  He is a public school librarian, so we fit all of our longer vacations into the months that he has off.  If our trip requires getting plane tickets, I start searching for the best prices up to 6 months in advance.  I always hit a bunch of sites, but my favorites have been Airfare Watchdog, Travelocity, Expedia, and Southwest Vacations.

Airfare Watchdog

Airfare Watchdog is an awesome way to monitor the prices of flights in your area.  I have bought a ticket through their site once, but I have also simply used the information it throws my way to pick the best times to patrol all of the other sites to get the best deal.  I love the fact that it is easy to use.

If you’d like to keep an eye out for the best prices on plane tickets to or from a certain place, simply sign up for email notifications.  Airfare Watchdog will then email you when specials occur for the trip you set it up to monitor.  For example, I was looking for a cheap ticket to Chicago to go to the Financial Blogger Conference at the end of September.   I signed up for email notifications in March for any good deals from Houston to Chicago and jumped on a $215 ticket that they notified me about a few weeks later.

(Click to continue reading…)

I’ve used Expedia and Travelocity in the past (they use the same databases, my choice all depends on whether or not I want to see Travelocity’s roaming gnome, good marketing guys!) but both are about to be supplanted by Yahoo Farechase… because Yahoo uses JAVAX and it’s fast. No more waiting on that “Searching airfare’s screen” that always seems to take forever, I think Farechase is going to capture some of that travel search market until the big boys start using JAVAX.

Here’s what I like about Yahoo Farechase:
1. Yahoo Farechase remembers your searches. How many times have you hit back on any of the other engines and had to tediously enter your information again? I hate it. I hate it with a passion. Yahoo remembers it. And not only does she remember it, when you click it she just populates the boxes so you can change them as you see fit, she doesn’t automatically start running the search again.

2. That progress bar means something. And they show you intermediate results. Farechase searches through all the airlines in its database (American Airlines, America West, US Airways, United, Delta Air Lines, Frontier Airlines, Alaska Airlines andContinental) and populates the list as it gets data.

3. That JAVAX filtering is sweet. The “Refine Results” panel allows you to check and uncheck departure times, airports, airlines, and the number of stops – each time updating the results without having to reload the page.

4. Forget the Airport Code? Just type in the city it’s in, slowly, and a drop down box will appear with possible airports and cities that you could be looking for. Very nice.

Basically I see Farechase as a tool I’d use instead of Expedia, Travelocity or any of the other flight search engines but, as with the others, you still need to check Airtran and Southwest Airlines’ websites directly for their fares. Farechase gets two thumbs up from me.

Oh, and if you think this is cool, just wait until you use it for hotels.