May 30, 2007
The State of Discount Airtravel
So planning for a European jaunt this summer I did a little research and found some decent discount airfare sites. It had been a while since I really searched for some new ones. While there are a few discount international deals, there’s nothing like RyanAir or EasyJet in Europe. Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia suck, especially for international travel. They are dead to me, forever. I’ve long been suspicious of them and for good reason: they do not find the cheapest flights!
Kayak.com seems to offer the best across the board search for international flights, from just about every source imaginable. Vayama.com, the coolest web 2.0 airfare search around, impressed me with the cheapest flight I could find, and a snazzy-ass website, but then failed the check out process at the very end with an obscure javascript error. It’s in Beta, and they obviously mean it. If they ever get things working, they’ll have no problem taking over the market. Farecast.com is certainly slick too, and promises to tell you if you should buy now or wait…if your flight is in their database. Strike 2 for web 2.0. Ultimately I booked though Fareline.com who also checked out cheapest via Kayak.com. I’m not sure how these would stack up against airbrokers.com and airtreks.com for multi-leg round the world type deals. I used airbrokers.com in 2001 and circumnavigated the globe in 6 flights for $1200. Same that I paid for a round trip to Europe this August.
Within Europe, I found flycheapo.com to be the most comprehensive list of discount flights.
Anything I’ve missed?
RyanAir is based in Ireland, I believe, and flies all over Europe. For example a RyanAir flight round-trip from Parma, Italy to London Stanstead costs anywhere from 99cents to 100 bucks depending on when you book.
Also are the old ticket ‘consolidators’ still going? I used to get some dynamite prices from those little companies that advertise in the back of the AJC Sunday Travel section.
Yeah, RyanAir and EasyJet are the best. The thing about flycheapo.com is that they list stuff from many other discount brokers as well. For instance, RyanAir doesn’t fly from Copenhagen to Kiev, but there are some cheap Baltic airlines that do..
In Spain, Terminal A is good (terminala.com). There were some other ones, but all of my bookmarks disappeared a little while ago and now I forget what they were.
I came across your comments on vayama. I am the ceo of vayama and we work diligently to iron out failures. I would appreciate if you could let me know what date/route/airline you tried to book. If you are still interested in that fare just let me know and we are more than happy to help you book that flight.
By the way, for cheapflights within Europe you can check wegolo.com
They feature all low cost airlines in Europe.
Dude, way to harvest consulting fees…
As if! That’s the business beauty of the internet. Just put it out there and you will get feedback for free.
I forwarded my situation to Andre, since I had opened a support case with them on it. Again, Vayama is a very promising looking site, and I wish them all the luck. Check out the wegolo.com site, Euro-travelers. Looks pretty complete at first glace.
I want to share with you what terrible experience I had with Vayama.
I made reservation online to travel to Russia for myself. I planned to travel there with my child. The customer service department notified me that the ticketing department would have to contact me to approve the infant’s fare since you can’t do the infant booking online the following day. They also told me that the infant fare is 10-15 % of the adult fare.
The next day I had to call MYSELF TWICE to inquire about my booking since I would not get any calls or emails about my reservations. Only after I talked to Kellan who marked my booking as urgent for reply I was contacted by the ticketing department. That was already past 6 pm the day after I made the reservation.When I expressed my concern over my booking, I was asked if I would like to cancel my booking. What kind of Customer Service is this? Later that day I was told by Nicole from the Ticketing Department that the infant fare is $388.15 while my adult fare is $1366.60. How come $388 could be 10% of $1366? It turns out that the infant ticket is actually calculated differently. But for some reason they failed to let me know of this fact when I talked to them initially. As far as I am concerned, I was deceived and this is absolutely a scam.
When I tried to contact the manager or supervisor over the phone to discuss this issue, I was told that there were no managers there at the moment. I was told that a certain manager called Mary would contact me the next day. I was contacted by nobody.
In addition, Vayama still charged me a Service fee.
Do not use VAYAMA!
Your article is much more informatics for all of the visitor or tourist. I am
very happy to read it. This is really very nice. Thank you for it.
Anyone that wants to fly international call me at 800-890-3731. We offer great deals for Europe. We work with bulk/consolidated prices.
Fly for less
Yo. Where you going this summer?
I’ll be in Europe in July sometime and hopefully can stop by Dublin.