Booking a Flight the Frugal Way

Today, however, booking a flight is a total mess. Travelocity and Expedia have been joined by Bing and Orbitz and Dohop and Vayama and CheapTickets and CheapOair and Kayak and SideStep and Mobissimo and and and … I could go on and list every single Website out there, but I won’t. There's lots of. In lieu, I’ll lead you through the steps I make when I’m booking a flight myself.

It used to be so simple. You wanted to go to Paris, so you called a travel agency, gave them your dates and budget, and with any luck, you soon had in your hands a real paper ticket with a real dollar value. Even in the early days of the Net, it was less hard. You went to seven of the few booking sites — Travelocity or Expedia, most likely — searched for your route, paid with a credit card and that was it. Perhaps you even got a paper ticket in the mail. Those were the days!

I’ve covered this territory a bit before — here and here — but today I’ll try to go in to more detail. For this experiment, let’s imagine a simple domestic trip: a weekend of snowboarding in Jackson Hole in Wyoming at the beginning of March.