Coupon Flying
New York City, USA You may have seen those shows about crazy couponers getting their family’s groceries for $1. I don’t have that kind o...
New York City, USA |
I already recommended signing up for airline emails. You’ll get first crack at any sales. The ULCCs are the best at giving coupons….again Spirit in particular. My absolute favorite is the 99% off sale. I used it to fly from New York to Los Angeles for $45.
In my last post I advised never to buy a ticket online from Spirit, but the 99% off deal is the exception. Coupons are only applicable online so you’re forced to pay the website fee. Make sure to read the list of routes available for travel. In many cases the most popular non-stops don’t apply to the coupons, but the secret is in shorter legs.
In my case I used Spirit.com’s “multi-city” feature. This allowed me to book two legs...LaGuardia-Detroit and Detroit-Los Angeles both applicable to the 99% off deal.
Frontier used to send out or publish promo codes infrequently. Usually it was for $10-$20 off. I haven’t seen them that much anymore, but sometimes it will at least cover the cost of the website fee.
Traditional carriers also really do have sales. It’s important to understand how sales work though.
Every flight has a set number of tickets available for sale in a respective sales bucket. Let’s say the first five seats go for $20 in Bucket A the next five for $30 in Bucket B and so on. The airline then decides to have a sale after Bucket A is depleted. This drops the fare in Bucket B to $20...not really a savings, but it is a sale.
There are some sites that will tell you the specific fare code indicating a deep discounted fare. I tend to ignore those and just look solely at price. If you’ve been checking a date and see a sale there’s a chance that fare bucket will get discounted depending on how many seats are available.
I like to leave the lifting for traditional carriers to the folks over at airfarewatchdog.com. They send me a daily email about the best deals and I decide if it works for my schedule.