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Look Before You Book
Access Magazine · March 17, 2001

How much cash can you save by booking travel online? Rob Argento saved more than $200 on an Alamo rental car in Los Angeles by clicking on Expedia. The Manhattan marketing executive shopped around online and even checked with the car rental company's site, before finding a $100 weekly rate - for a convertible.

Looking for a lower airfare, Sherri Pfefer, a consultant for a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., software company, checked out the Southwest Airlines Web site. That's where she discovered she could whittle down to $161 the $361 fare her travel agent quoted her for a flight from Fort Lauderdale to New Orleans.

"I used to call a travel agent first, but now I just go straight online," she says. "The prices are almost always better."

People routinely save hundreds of dollars by going online to book airline tickets, hotel rooms and rental cars. But just clicking on the Web doesn't mean you'll get the best deal available. You need to know where to look, and you need to hit the right site at the right time.

In the fast-changing world of travel pricing, where fares fluctuate like stocks, the best strategy is: Check multiple sites, and if you have time, check them more than once. Argento, for example, shopped around at a variety of car rental sites before getting a steal on the convertible. Pfefer did her shopping, too, but she also had another thing going for her: timing. Fares to New Orleans were dropping as her travel date approached.

Why are travel prices sometimes so much cheaper online? Partly because the airlines, car rental companies and hotels regard the Internet as a place they can sell their products without having to pay a middleman, who typically takes a 10 percent commission. Another reason is that most travel products -- especially seats on an airplane -- are considered "perishable." Once the plane leaves the gate, any unsold seats aren't going to make the airline any money. Thanks to the Web, suppliers can offer last-minute deals on the unused inventory, so that they can fill the remaining seats or hotel rooms.

When Carol Boyd, an Internet consultant in Covington, Ky., had to commute from Cincinnati to Hartford, Conn., on most weekends last year, she looked everywhere for the best deal. She tried Delta Air Lines because she's a frequent flier with that airline, but the best she could find was a round-trip fare of $350. Then she clicked on Northwest Airlines' site and pared the price down to $160. Over a year, she's saved $4,750, she says.

Boyd's success is no fluke. She took time to study all of her options, and she monitored the rise and fall of ticket prices to get a sense of when the best deals typically become available. Airlines determine when demand is highest and lowest and price tickets accordingly.

"There are tremendous resources online," says Shel Horowitz, author of "The Penny-Pinching Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant's Pocketbook". "The sites aren't just good for comparison-shopping, but they're also a great place to buy travel. The prices are often far better than you'd get through a travel agent."

He ought to know. This month, he and his family flew from Hartford to Oakland, Calif., for $230 each on Southwest Airlines -- a savings of about $200 per person. How'd he find such a deal? Horowitz is a regular reader of an electronic newsletter published by Smarter Living, which sends a weekly dispatch of low fares to his e-mail account.

Smarter Living, an "online consumer community," is a solid source of travel bargains, especially last-minute airfares. Sign up for DealAlert! Newsletters and get a weekly list. You can't book arrangements at the site, but you can search for reduced air tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars and vacation packages.

Many of the airlines will regularly transmit alerts to your e-mail inbox if you sign up for them. Continental's CO.O.L. Travel Specials, notifying you of weekend getaway deals, is a good example.

"Booking a trip online is a roll of the dice. Sometimes you can do well, sometimes you don't," warns Jack Mannix, president of the Institute of Certified Travel Agents, a travel agent certification organization based in Wellesley, Mass.

Mannix, by virtue of his job, is partial to travel agents, but he has a point. Often, travel agents have access to special rates that an online agency doesn't, and which can be even more of a bargain than a supplier's Web site. But there's no guarantee it will be the best price you'll find.

Grant Slater had good luck with the Web. Late last year, he needed to fly from Houston to Greensboro, N.C., on a day's notice for a meeting. The manager for a litigation services company called his travel agent, who quoted him a round-trip fare of $1,323, "the best he could do." So Slater went to Hotwire, a site where suppliers bid against each other for your business. A joint venture of major carriers including American Airlines, Continental Airlines and US Airways, Hotwire offers discounts of up to 40 percent.

At Hotwire, you can't choose the airline you'll fly on, and you can't choose flight times. But if, like Slater, you don't mind giving up a certain amount of control, you can save big. Giving up his frequent flier miles and his choice of airline and schedule seemed like a small sacrifice when Hotwire offered him a fare of $158. Slater saved $1,165.

"It turned out to be a United Airlines flight and the flight times were very good," he says. Slater had that thing you can't always count on: luck.

Hotel giants such as Hilton and Marriott post special deals on their sites, especially weekend bargains. But if you don't have a preference for hotel brands or can't find a price you like, check sites that search for rooms at a variety of hotel types.

Ryan Goodman, a junior at the University of Miami, thought finding two rooms for his father and grandfather in South Beach this month would be all but impossible. Then he came across Quikbook, through which he managed to reserve two suites at the Hilton Grand Vacation Club at South Beach for $125 each per night. (A one-bedroom suite normally is $350 per night, not including tax.)

"I had used the Internet to buy plane tickets, but I didn't think it was possible to get a good hotel rate online," Goodman says. He didn't have any particular expertise in booking hotels. He lucked out by visiting Quikbook when it had some great arrangements with Hilton. Quikbook negotiates with hotels for low rates and lets travelers take advantage of volume discounts.

Matthew Engelbert, a video coordinator for the University of Iowa, also saved a lot when he booked his hotel online. Using a smart strategy of shopping around, he had called numerous hotels and clicked to various hotel chain sites in search of a room in Tampa, Fla., in February. "We were getting rates of $160 a night for some of the hotels, and we felt that was too much money," he recalls. Then he surfed over to Travelocity.com, the online travel megamart, where he found a $107 rate at the Wyndham Westshore in Tampa. Sites such as Travelocity.com offer rates that are negotiated with hotel chains, so they're often considerably lower than you'd get from even the hotel's own Web presence.

Douglas MacKenzie, an advertising executive in San Diego, has his own strategy. He likes to use bid sites like Priceline.com for his hotels, but first he calls a hotel's 800-number, asks what the going rate is for a room, and then bids a quarter of that. He recently paid $41 for a room at a Woodfin Suite Hotel that normally goes for $189.

Looking at dozens of Web sites will probably turn up a good deal, but it can be time-consuming. Some sites will cast the net wide for you. Karen Wlodarski, a real estate agent in Johns Island, S.C., read about a new site and accompanying software called SideStep just before she had to plan a trip to Southern California this year. SideStep, like Qixo and FareChase, searches the sites of multiple travel suppliers (about 80, in SideStep's case).

Wlodarski first called Hertz to get a price on a full-size weekly rental car and was offered a $300 rate. Then she used SideStep and found a quote of $140 from Hertz' Web site. She booked it on the spot.

SideStep has its problems, though. Several ticked-off users have complained that its software, which works only with Internet Explorer 4 and later on a Windows computer, is difficult to remove once it's installed. One visitor to the site said the software ended up on his computer even though he did not intentionally download it. But Phil Carpenter, SideStep's vice president of marketing, says there's "no way" for the program to download without a user clicking for it.

Finding the perfect travel deal online does indeed involve a bit of luck. But it also involves persistence, and using the right Web sites. Start your next search at the sites mentioned in this article. If you don't find what you're looking for today, come back tomorrow. On the Internet, things change quickly.

Christopher Elliott is a journalist and commentator based in Annapolis, Md. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.