A new try, Expedia +1

let's say for this one that we want to go to Chicago (CHI) from Los Angeles (LAX) for a week in January.

For now, the price seem to be the same as long as we are not traveling on Sunday. So for the sake of this try, we will leave on Monday, the 9th 2012 and come back a week after, the 16th. This time, skyscanner.net wasn't the cheapest, nor was kayak with respectively $240 and $239 but it was expedia.com at $217.93. It seems that expedia.com is pretty good, but each time I was looking for a real ticket, it didn't do it for me!

For this search, I used most of the engine, Orbitz, Expedia, Hotwire, Webjet, Kayak, CheapOair, Hotwire, Cheaptickets, Onetravel, and so on. And appart from expedia.com, they were all around the same price of 240$

Is the day of the week important when you want to buy your ticket?

We easily understand that the day you will fly will change the price of the ticket, usually flying during the weekend starting on Thursday is more expansive. But actually the day you do the search or you want to but your ticket is going to affect the price of your ticket! For example, yesterday, Tuesday the 16 of November, I got a price of 556$ with skyscanner.net but today, on Wednesday, the price is at 587$, a difference of 21$!

SO YES, THE DAY OF THE WEEK YOU WANT
TO BUY YOUR TICKET IS IMPORTANT!

From personal experience, TUESDAY is usually the best day to buy the ticket, but I will keep on investigating to come back with some figures! So keep posted!

Who is the cheapest?

Let's do a try with some of the different websites. First, let's try to find the cheapest way to go to London from NewYork using KAYAK. To leave around the 23 of Nov 2011 and to come back around the 7 of Dec 2011.

(NYC) to (LON) from 11/23/2011 to 11/07/2011

From this first search, for this route, it seems that the cheaper is to fly Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday for both way (So let's pick Tuesday 22 Nov to Tuesday 06 Dec)! The best price that KAYAK is showing is 631$ with VIRGIN ATLANTIC, which is a very good company. Let see if from there we can actually get this price.

KAYAK refers us to Orbitz and there, the price is 630.60$

KAYAK tells us we can also get the same price from cheaptickets.com and virgin-atlantic.com which is true so you can pick the one you like. Will KAYAK always be that trustworthy, I don't know, the future of this blog will tell you!

Can we find a better deal somewhere else?

To compare with other, I used www.farecompare.com

expedia.com also announce 631$ but before that give me a surprising 617$, for now expedia.com has not been that impressive to me, so let see if it's going to make me lie! let's go for this price! This is a Expedia Bargain Fare and total price for this trip is $616.99 and it seems that it is legitimate so, I am pretty impressed for this time with expedia.com. The airline is a carrier not known.

CheapOair.com announced the price at 413$ and at first you might be wow! so much better, but then you realize that it's without the different taxes! And this is one of my "pet peeve"! Why would you give me the price without the taxes? Or at least not show the price with it under or something! The price without the taxes is of no interest since the taxes are often at least 20% of the price! When I'm looking for a good price for a ticket, who cares to know the price without the taxes? seriously!!!
But now it I click on this annoying 413$ what do I get? I get a pretty good 615.62$, the best price so far CheapOair! Why don't you advertise this price in front CheapOair??? For the airline, it is a carrier not known, certainly the same as expedia!

Webjet.com offers the Virgin Atlantic flight for 628.24$, pretty good price if you like to use a well known airliner.

Now, still from farecompare, I'm finding an intriguing 556$ from www.skyscanner.net so let's investigate that one! this is also for the Virgin Atlantic flight. It send me to www.ebookers.com and it's giving me the price in £351.33 if I use a converter, it's equal to... 556.075 USD

For this search we have the winner at 556.075USD on Virgin Atlantic!

So for this search, Farecompare.com was really useful, followed by Expedia.com and Kayak helped a lot too.