When Flight Cost Goes Down
Airline flight tickets have become really, really expensive. We have canceled our planned trip to France this summer, and are planning our long-overdue family vacation at the domestic level.
Suppose you’ve paid for airline tickets, and then you find the same flight a week later for less cash. Is there anything you can do about it?
It turns out that there is. United, JetBlue, USAir, Southwest and Alaska will give you a voucher for the difference in price – if you know enough to ask them for it.
If you want to buy the new tickets, however, you may face serious fees – even for the same itinerary and on the same airline! Continental and America charge $100, Delta charges $50, Frontier charges $35 and Northwest charges $25.
Still, the difference in price might be worth it. If you’d like to be notified when your flight price is reduced, sign up for alert e-mails from yapta.com. You’ll have to act pretty much immediately when you get the alert, but it might be worth it.
(Thank you once again, Clark Howard)
I plan on hitting Myrtle Beach in July, but only to attend a wedding, and I’ll probly drive. The chance that I am on a no-fly list is a pretty good one, dontcha think?
Just wanted to say thanks for the thinking blogger thing. It actually made me return to the site to hopefully begin writing again. A lot has happened in the past few months and now that school is over I might have the time to begin processing most of it. Any way, I just wanted to say thanks, good luck with the domestic vacation, and take care.
grace and peace
Yapta is definitely got something interesting there. They’re definitely a step up from Farecast. It’s still a bit of a gimmick but a much nicer version of it. I’m curious to see if they maintain their status as a toolbar or if they will eventually migrate to a web interface much like Sidestep did. I actually like Sidestep on the web better than a toolbar only because it’s not as intrusive. I know that for a while Sidestep’s toolbar was considered spyware at first. I wonder if Yapta is having similar issues. Anyone know?