Philadelphia PHL --> STT St Thomas

[njrktect]

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/

[thereuare]

Congratulations on your win and thank you for sharing your results with the board.

Glad to see your research resulted in some savings and you're happy with the deal you received.

Please use these PRICELINE and HOTWIRE links to begin your travel purchases.

Have a great trip!