Thought I'd pass on my experiences with trying to get a decent fare for a planned vacation to St Thomas US Virgin Islands. The good part is I had a lot of flexibility in my schedule, or at least I did back in mid-April when I started to look into a trip. I wanted to plan a trip for 4 for anywhere from 9 days to 12 days in August. I am the type who likes to research stuff like travel planning to death! I immediately saw in the first two weeks of watching fares that it's a volatile fare... with low fare ranging from $290 to $470 per person often in less than 24 hours! I saw good flights for $301 and almost jumped on them, but had not been able to confirm the condo use (free!) for those dates. So I waited... As bad luck would have it, the fares did not drop again for 2 1/2 months!! But by then my kids had made other plans for the open August dates. *sigh* Then it occurred to my wife that we should plan a trip for just the two of us for later when the kids were back at college. Sweet idea. That's why I married her! Here's what happened. I set up fare watching alerts with two services-- Farecast.com and YAPTA.com. Well shortly after this Farecast was absorbed by MSN Travel and then morphed into BING.com. I never received reliably timely alerts from bing. You can keep them. I miss Farecast. YAPTA seems very nice and timely. I started with flexible searches on Travelocity to find generally good low fares on a range of dates. Then on YAPTA I set up over 20 alerts for specific dates. By the end of June I received several email notices that flights I was interested in had dropped below a threshold I set ($350) for September thru November. Then I discovered a fantastic tool for flexible and comprehensive flight fare searching: http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ very cool. A lot like Travelocity.com's flexible search, they let you search for flights and fares for any 30 day period... So about July 1st, I saw Delta had lowered a bunch of their flights in Sept thru November. One alert said $280! But within 12 hours it had risen to $302 and then $340. Two days later it was back to $420. (This is for the exact same flights!!) But now I had a target. 14 days ago, I saw they had dropped to $301 again. So I went on Priceline and checked their regular fares... Yes, $301 was available for some specific flights. So I tried a name my own price and started at $180 (plus the $71 in fees) and got a counter offer of $289 (total). I almost grabbed it but decided to go back and use a different local city that would default to PHL and bid again at $190. Same counteroffer. I was a bit worried about getting stuck with a long layover or leaving St Thomas too early in the morning... (Who wants to catch a 7 am flight to go home from vacation?!) So I did some homework and found that there were no flights on those days I would not be willing to accept. (The nasty ones had 12 hour layovers in San Juan, or left at 5:30 AM-- both of which were not within Priceline's parameters. And all Delta flights returned in the afternoon. I did this by scrolling thru EVERY possible flight on those days at ITAsoftware.) But being the annoying type, I did another offer again using another local town bidding $203... and it was accepted!! Total cost $274. That's only a 9% savings below the best published fare, but hey, it's not bad and it was for the same exact flights! That $60 will buy a lot of rum... 11/9 PHL-STT Delta flight 1007/675 11/21 STT-PHL Delta flights 676/1298 I'm happy. I got flights I would have been willing to pay full price for at a modest discount with no surprises! I hope this was helpful to someone... michael PS: Other than those two websites, here are two other services worth taking a look at: http://www.farecompare.com/ http://www.airfarewatchdog.com/
