A Cyber-Novice’s Search for Deals

“One Week Stay, Club Med Huatulco, $278.60”

“Travelers ages 18-22, $45 standby fares”

“Ultimate Vacation--Vegas, Cancun, Hawaii--Only $9.99”

All day, every day, deals like these, which may or may not be too good to be true, are promoted on the Internet. It’s enough to make a budget traveler’s pulse thrum.

In the past, I have always bagged travel bargains by clipping ads and hanging on the phone. Lately, though, with everyone talking about booking travel deals on the Web, I’ve wondered what I’m missing.

One woman I know, experienced at cruising the Web, recently found a last-minute round-trip fare from L.A. to Vancouver on Alaska Airlines for $99. So, for a lark, she booked it, reserved a room online at a modest hotel, and took her daughter to Vancouver for the weekend. They wound up spending a little more than $500 for the whole trip.

Was her experience unusual? And can a person with only modest experience surfing the Web cash in?

To answer these questions, earlier this month I took a trip on the Internet. But though the journey lasted more than a week, it was no vacation. I visited online travel agencies, got tempted by last-minute cut-rate air fares to Honolulu and Japan, and even bid in a cyber-auction to see if I could nab a Club Med vacation for a rock-bottom price.

When it was over, what I had for my considerable investment of time was a reasonably priced fare to Washington, D.C., to visit my mom for Mother’s Day. Not exactly the stuff of dreams, but along the way I learned a few lessons that will save steps the next time I look for travel deals on the World Wide Web.

The first lesson? Some Internet “deals” are more trouble to claim than they’re worth. The second: You’ve got to start out with a clear sense of what you’re after, or you’ll get hopelessly distracted jumping from one site to another. The third is that you must comparison shop to get the best deals, which tend to be last-minute fares offered on airline Web sites.

Spur-of-the-moment travelers are saving money because some segments of the travel industry have found that the Internet is an effective way to sell off empty airline seats and hotel rooms. Take the average economy-class airline ticket from L.A. to Washington, D.C. In mid-May, it was priced at about $600 if purchased 21 days in advance. Fourteen days before departure the fare rose to more than $800, then tripled if you tried to book it a week later. That’s typical: As you get nearer the flight date, the ticket price rises.

But two days before the flight, an airline might find the plane isn’t full, so it puts a block of seats up for sale on the Web. As a result, the world’s turned upside-down for airline passengers with Internet access. They are discovering that last-minute tickets can be cheaper than those purchased in advance.

The complicated calculating that airlines do to keep their planes full is known as yield management. More and more, resorts, hotels, cruise lines and car rental agencies are practicing yield management too, dumping their distressed inventories (packages at out-of-season resorts, cruises with itineraries that haven’t caught on and the like) on the Web, where bottom-feeders hunt.

By all accounts, it works. One week in April, MSN Expedia (https:// expedia.msn.com), the Internet’s third-busiest travel site (behind Travelocity, https://www.travelocity.com, and Preview Travel, https://previewtravel.com), sold $16 million in tickets and trips. At about the same time, Priceline (https://priceline.com), the much-advertised site that lets travelers bid on airline tickets, did a million-dollar day, or about one sale every 17 seconds.

The potential for big business has resulted in a proliferation of travel-related Web sites. Indeed, there seem to be more of them than shops in the Marrakech souk, where you can wander for days trying to decide whether to buy a carpet from one salesman or the next. But you never quite know whether you’ve bargained your way to a good price because you may not know how much your rug is actually worth.

The Internet travel bazaar is just like that. You shop around, buy a ticket and take a chance that you got a deal. Accomplished Web surfers who are also travel savvy find it challenging and fun. But the Web severely tests bargain-hunting novices like me, who don’t know where to start, what to do when you get an error message or how to pass the time while waiting for the Web page you want to slowly appear.

Meanwhile, you look up at the clock and gasp. Four hours have passed since you logged on. You’ve missed an important phone call, and the cat hasn’t been fed!

And when it looks as if you’ve found an airline ticket at a price you like, there may be trouble ahead. In most cases, you’ve got to enter a date and departure time, coming and going, on a Web site’s booking screen. That date and time must match the availability of the fare you’re after in order to capture it. In other words, the cheap fare may not be available at the times you desire.

For example, I tried to get a $208 last-minute fare from L.A. to New York listed on the Delta Airlines Web site (https://www.delta-air.com). Frustrated, I finally telephoned the airline to find out why I couldn’t make the program give me the promised price. The reservations agent told me: “Try [typing in] different times, late at night or early in the morning, or another New York airport. But I can’t help you. The reason Internet specials are so low is because you have to find the fares yourself.”

But take heart. There are shockingly good deals to be had if you are flexible and persistent. Those with one special place in mind can also benefit, provided they register for weekly e-mail messages from the airlines and fare-tracking Web sites. If you keep at it, you can probably score a modest success, perhaps 30% off the published price for advance-purchase economy tickets.

To reach D.C., I cruised about two dozen sites, gradually identifying a few I liked (which I’ll use almost exclusively in the future). Some, like MSN Expedia, Travelocity and Preview Travel, are all-purpose online travel agencies with booking components, functions that locate the lowest published fares on major airlines and information about destinations.

But again, finding a low fare and actually getting it are two different things. Indeed, fairly early in the game on the Travelocity Web site, I found a $198 fare on Continental from L.A. to the Baltimore airport, about a 45-minute drive from my parents’ home in suburban Washington. I guess somebody got it, but no matter which departure hours I asked for on the booking screen I couldn’t capture the $198 fare. After trying a dozen times, my hands were in my hair, ready to tear.

Recently, Travelocity solved this problem by instituting a “best fare finder” feature that shows you exactly when the fare you want is available. A week before I planned to leave, it showed me the $198 round-trip Continental fare, but in just one click of the mouse it also told me that there were no seats left at that price at my desired departure times. All other flight options to Baltimore cost at least $400, more than I wanted to spend. Still, I now had a sense of what constituted a bargain, if I could ever snare one.

Next, I explored a handful of discount travel sites like Bestfares.com (https://bestfares.com), a real Filene’s Basement with everything from last-minute airline deals to ski reports. But if you want access to more deals, and a subscription to Best Fares magazine, you’ve got to pay $59.90 to become a site member.

Like Bestfares.com, Lowestfare.com (https://lowestfare.com) and Smarter Living (https://smarterliving.com) track Web specials (an invaluable service that makes it unnecessary to visit every airline Web site when looking for cheap fares). Bestfares and Smarter Living offer weekly e-mail reports identifying what’s on sale, a great way to keep tabs on constantly changing fares to a favored destination. In some cases, you may need to provide credit-card information when you register at the site (make sure the site and browser you use are secure). Bestfares and Lowestfare take your ticket orders directly, but Smarter Living shows you a fare and then sends you to the appropriate airline site to book your seat. When I looked, none of them came up with a good deal on a fare to D.C., but Bestfares.com alerted me to a Northwest Airlines International CyberSaver fare from L.A. to Tokyo for an amazing $399 over Mother’s Day weekend.

Compulsively, I also logged in at Cheap Tickets (https://www.cheaptickets.com), an airline consolidator I’ve used before, by phone, with excellent results. There I found Continental’s $198 L.A.-to-Baltimore fare, which still wasn’t available in my desired time frame, and another fare on the same route for $312, but also at wretched times (arriving at about 2 a.m. on Friday). To get a more convenient departure time, I’d have to pay $595.

Then I pushed on to the airline Web sites. I learned my way around, signed up to receive weekly e-mails on last-minute Web-only specials and finally grasped how they work. With some exceptions, they are posted on Wednesday for departures the following Thursday, Friday or Saturday and returns on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday. Generally the sale price doesn’t include “passenger facility charges” of up to $12. Tickets are nonrefundable and not changeable, and are issued electronically. Standby is not allowed. You do get frequent-flier miles, except when you choose to use mileage reward points to bring down the cost of a ticket (for instance, I found a TWA Hot Deal from St. Louis to D.C. priced at $149, or $99 plus 5,000 TWA Aviators program points).

But the terms and conditions vary from airline to airline, so it behooves shoppers to read the fine print. I spent a good deal of time doing just that, and registering at the Delta, United, Continental, TWA and American sites so I’d be ready to make a booking by the time the Wednesday before Mother’s Day arrived.

My mother always says that the devil takes charge of idle hands. Perhaps that’s what happened to me while I waited, and got distracted by cruising travel auction sites such as EBay (https://www.ebay.com), SkyAuction (https://skyauction.com) and Luxury Link (https://www.luxurylink.com)--not to mention two other sites, AuctionWatch (https://www.auctionwatch.com) and Bidder’s Edge (https://www.biddersedge.com), which monitor the action.

These electronic auction houses put everything from touring bikes to cruises on the block, telling you the current lowest bid, the bidding increments required and when the auction ends. There I saw marvels: a week at the Club Med Turkoise in the Turks and Caicos Islands of the Caribbean (including air fare from New York) with bidding starting at $150; five nights for two in a suite at La Casa de la Marquesa, a colonial gem near Mexico’s San Miguel de Allende, with the latest bid at $445; and an eye-goggler, two nights in Las Vegas for $9.99.

Even my mother wouldn’t have wanted me to pass up deals like these, so I did a bit of research to determine how much these temptations were actually worth. Some sites give retail “values” for the items up for sale. But, as in that Marrakech souk, even when you call a place like La Casa de la Marquesa to check the rates, you never really know how much you could bargain the desk clerk down if you managed to be particularly persuasive on the phone or simply showed up at the door one day.

Bidding for the Club Med vacation and Mexico package quickly escalated beyond the price I considered a bargain. But I did come away with a $9.99 coupon for a weekend in Vegas. When it arrived, however, I was instructed to fill out a form, send another $10 to an address in Florida, and expect instructions on how to redeem the certificate soon.

At last the Wednesday before Mother’s Day rolled around. I logged onto the Internet to look for a last-minute bargain fare. A few things looked good. There was a $208 round-trip Delta fare from L.A. to New York, but I’d have to spend an extra $200 getting from the Big Apple to D.C. Continental had a $139 ticket from Houston to D.C., but getting from L.A. to Houston would cost $657.

Of course, I also looked at other sale destinations, just in case there was something too good to pass up. Alaska Airlines had round-trip fares to cities in the Pacific Northwest, like Seattle and Vancouver, for $159 to $200, which still wasn’t enough to make me miss Mom on Mother’s Day. But a $198 fare from L.A. to Honolulu on Delta (available at convenient departure and arrival times) almost seduced me--until I started checking hotel chain Web sites and online room discounters. The cheapest nightly rate I could find at a hotel that appealed to me was at the Waikiki Hilton for $171, enough to take the bargain right out of the last-minute Delta deal.

In the end, I was happy to find two TWA specials, called Hot Deals, one from L.A. to St. Louis for $149, another from St. Louis to D.C. for $179, bringing my trip total to $348 when those so-called passenger facility charges were added. I booked it, alerted Mom and felt fine.

Fine, that is, until I talked to the friend who booked the cheap fare to Vancouver. She showed me a Cheap Tickets newspaper ad offering fares to D.C. for under $300. I phoned Cheap Tickets to learn from an exceedingly nice reservations agent that he could get me to Washington for Mother’s Day for $319 including tax. I’d have felt horrible, but there was no looking back: My online ticket was nonrefundable.

And when I got to Washington, the azaleas were in bloom. I went biking and watched the setting sun turn the Potomac silver. Before I left L.A., I checked a Web site called CultureFinder (https://culturefinder.com), which alerted me to a John Singer Sargent exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. Mom, Dad and I saw it, then had tea and scones at a Georgetown hotel. I guess the sight of Mom with crumbs in her lap made all the time and trouble I’d spent on the Internet worthwhile.