Buying your Ticket Online

when updating the last edition of this book my editor thought that °nlme ticket sellers were the one and only future of the travel naustry. Yeah, right. Basically, an online ticket vendor is no differ-ent from a consolidator or an agent that specializes in budget travel. They can only sell tickets at a low price if they buy tickets at a low price, and they can only do that if they have business relationships with the airlines or with ticket brokers. Sound familiar? All those places promising dirt-cheap tickets online are only doing for the general public what consolidators had been doing all along for smart travelers. The online crowd simply used the “Internet-is-the-Future” frenzy of the late 1990s to market themselves as the be-all and end-all of travel.

The types of websites and online services out there are endless and almost all seem to offer the “deal of the century.” What service is best for you mostly depends on how flexible you can be in terms of when you leave, where to and from, and what airline you prefer. If you are willing to sacrifice your freedom in any and all of these, you may just find that deal. However, you don’t need to give up too much to find some alternatives on the “Web.

Some of the most alluring travel websites are those promoting last-minute deals. I’d say stay away, as you should be planning well in advance for your trip anyway. Other sites are more like online consolidators, dumping tickets for major airlines. Still, these discount agent and consolidator sites often have better-than-average deals and are worth checking out before buying a ticket elsewhere. There are also the somewhat dodgy “name-your-own-price” services. Basically, if you do name your own price and they match it, then you have just bought your ticket, without getting to review the airline times, number of stops, and routes involved. On mainstream and well-known sites, such as Travelocity, Expedia, and Yahoo, or that of any major airline, true low-cost deals can be few and far between, but they are there.

The advantage to surfing for a ticket online is your ability to research and play around with prices, itineraries, and destinations at your own pace, in the privacy of your own home (or work station). There’s less pressure to buy, since it’s an anonymous process -though that can also be a strike against, as there is no one there to , answer your questions, and deals can come and go quite quickly. Keep in mind, too, that the information you are accessing is basically the same a consolidator is getting hold of; you’re not getting an exclusive deal just because you found it online. Also, cheap seats often come with many restrictions. Moral: always read the fine print.

If buying a ticket online is still too foreign a concept for you, that’s okay; you needn’t feel compelled to catch the latest wave. Think of the Internet instead as a research tool and use it to compare prices quoted to you by agents or to find out more about that mysterious airline the consolidator swears can get you to Amsterdam for USD 300 less than any major airline. If you are nervous about releasing your credit card number into the wilds of cyberspace, rest assured that pretty much every booking site is secure (encoded during transport from your computer to the ticketing company). Finally, if you have an email account you check often, sign up for the daily or weekly airfare and travel-related updates certain websites offer. The site ®www,travelzoo.com, for instance, sends out weekly emails of the twenty best airfare, car rental, hotel, and package deals going.