Wife and I decided very recently that we would like to go to Washington, DC next weekend. Airline tickets are currently selling for about $620 each. We don’t want to pay that much; if that’s the best we can do, then we’ll wait until next year, when we can plan things farther in advance and get a better deal on tickets.
But I wonder if the airline will sell us cheap tickets at the last minute.
Question: if I call them up the day before departure (or even just a few hours before departure), and offer $250 each for two round-trip tickets, are they likely to agree? Do their telephone agents even have the authority to haggle like that?
If I have a chance of success with this, then we can pack bags and plan activities so that we’ll be ready to travel. If not, then we won’t bother.
Where are you flying from? $620 sounds too high for a ticket to D.C. from anywhere but most obscure airports.
There are lots of travel sites that give good deals on last minute tickets.
Start with www.kayak.com which is just a good airfare search site in general and searches all the other major air fare engines for the best deal.
www.travelzoo.com is also excellent. They offer last minute packages and all kinds of other good deals. The chance for you finding that specific trip is low but worth a shot.
If those don’t turn up anything, there are true last minute ticket resellers. Airlines don’t like to fly planes with empty seats and they don’t like to offer many last minute deals themselves so they sell them to consolidators. You can find those on Google but availability varies according to demand. You can try every day between now and then though and will probably be able to beat $620 easily.
I left out Priceline.com. They have some last minute tickets available. They may get cheaper as the departure date approaches but they might all get sold as well so it wis worth taking anything that looks good enough after you do some comparison shopping.
Also keep in mind that you have the choice of two or maybe three airports to comparison shop: Reagan National, Dulles, and maybe Baltimore. The latter two will work better if you are renting a car especially since it is just a weekend trip.
Flying out of Detroit (Wayne County Metro). We’ve tried Thursday/Sunday, Friday/Sunday, and Friday/Monday for travel days, but it doesn’t matter much. Keep in mind that DC’s 100th annual cherry blossom festival is in full swing, and this weekend in particular, Sakura Matsuri is happening at the same time. Basically, it’s a popular time for weekend getaways to DC.
Our target is Reagan, since it’s just a 3-mile train ride to our preferred hotel from there.
Using Kayak, I was able to find $313 from DTW to BWI. Idk about you, but I’d be willing to ride the subway for a few more minutes to save $300, but that’s just me.
That was the best deal I found too. The Reagan tickets really are $600+ and it very likely they will stay that way. There are some $300+ tickets going into Dulles too but they are multi-airline with one stop and I have learned from experience that is asking for trouble.
If it were me, I would just take the Baltimore tickets enjoy the extra $600 to do something fun.
While there’s some truth to this, I think the real problem is that the OP is narrowing their options too far. The trick to last minute travel is to be open— sometimes that means open on destinations or hotels . . . or sometimes it means being open to a slightly longer train ride to get to your hotel from the airport. I’ve done BWI to get to DC before and had no issues at all with the train trip.
DCA is almost always the most expensive of the three, by quite a bit, even if you get the tickets well in advance. You pay for the convenience of being that close to DC (as well as directly on the subway line), and it doesn’t help that Southwest doesn’t fly in to DCA.
Using public transportation to get from BWI to Union Station will take about an hour, give or take a bit.