Airline Fanatic

When it comes to finding and booking air fares we all know there is no better feeling than knowing you paid less for your seat than the person sitting right next to you. There is so much more to getting the perfect flight and a good traveling experience along with those cheap airline tickets. This guide is meant as a resource for you to help make that process a little trying, time consuming and more fun! Just follow the step by step process and I promise you will be better off for it.

1) There is no better domestic air travel engine than Kayak. Trust me, I’ve spent many hours comparing and contrasting it with the other major travel aggregators, and there is no tool that gives you a more complete selection of options than Kayak. This is a great place to first start your search. The best part is the power you have to filter the search results by time, search multiple dates at once, and check options from all the airports in your area! Kayak is blazing fast, updating your results based on your search filters right before your eyes. Go ahead and try a search below (opens to new page).

2)Were finding the perfect flight so easy, we would all be much less stressed. Of course its not, and thats why FlightStats has given us some wonderful tools to go behind our prospective flights we found in Kayak. Enter the flight rating widget. This little gizmo lets you check the overall “quality” of your prospective flight. Is it chronically late or delightfully on time? This little guy will help you find out. If you haven’t quite set your heart on one particular flight yet you can also sort by route, time of day, and airline to see which flights are most on time along your route. Try it out right here.

3) Now hopefully between the last two tools you’ve been able to come up with a flight that matches your price point andschedule. But what happens if you are lucky enough to have two flights that meet your criteria? Well it probably comes down to where you’ll be sitting right? Most airlines have the ability to preview the open seats on a plane before your book your ticket, which is great. What isn’t so great is that you and I both know all seats aren’t created equal, and unless you’ve flown on every model of every airline, you will probably never know. But hark, SeatGuru comes to our rescue, providing extremely helpful maps that point out the best and worst seats on virtually every airline and virtually ever aircraft type. Go check your options our here.

4) If you are still horribly torn between two or more flights, or are just unsold on your only flight choice, then consider the preflight and inflight experience on board your aircraft. While airline rankings are fine and dandy, they rarely are based on people who have actually flown in every class of every airline, what kind of data is that? Instead try reading individual traveler accounts in the SkyTrax passenger flight review section. Don’t be put off by the spartan appearance of the page, its full of actual people review their flying experience on many of the world’s airlines. Hopefully they can give you some great insight on what to expect the check in areas, cabins, crews and baggage claims – all very important pieces of information.

5) Finally, your done right? WRONG. Just one more step to make sure you are buying the absolute best ticket and flying experience you can possibly find. Farecast is another travel aggregator with a very novel and very important twist – it actually predicts which way fares are heading on many popular routes. In many cases, especially if booking early, you are probably going to be getting the best deal already. But Farecast constantly watched data and predicts when airlines are going to drop fares through sales or because of regular changes in fare patterns. If Farecast predicts the cost of your trip is going to drop in the near future, then wait! But wait, 50% of fare drops last less than 50 hours, how will you know when they do? Don’t worry, you wont have to constantly keep checking back, as Farecast can update you by email or RSS feed when your trip actually does go down. Head over here to try it out.

There you have it! That is your five step guide to making sure you have the absolutely positively best deal and best flight experience money can buy, well that is if you aren’t going to pony up for first class or your own private jet anyway. I use all these tools every time I book my flights, and you should too. Enjoy your trip wherever you are going and have a safe flight!