I want to travel from San Diego (or Los Angeles) to Phuket, Thailand at the end of April or beginning of May. My travel dates are somewhat flexible. I tried shopping at Travelocity.com. They had some great bargains, but when I clicked on the dates shown as available, I was told they weren’t actually available. I had to split the San Diego / Phuket trip into San Diego / Bangkok and Bangkok / Phuket to have any success, and even then it took a lot of trial and error, and the “$690” round trip to Bangkok somehow ended up as $870. Is this worth it? Should I go to a real travel agent, or is there a better online travel site I should try?
Well, I flew SYD-BKK back in 2000, and that was when the online travel agents were first really taking off, as it were. I went to a few thinking, “hey, no bricks and mortar, lower wager, cheaper fares!”, but didn’t see any great deals, then I walked into the first travel agency on the street, and scored a deal hundreds of dollars cheaper. I’ve no idea if it’s changed or not now. That was quite a while ago.
This FAQ claims that, whereas online ticket sites contractually aren’t allowed to give any sort of discounts, real travel agents get around that restriction. I would try calling some of these ticket consolidators, wherever they may be found.
Don’t misunderestimate a real travel agent. They have access to more airlines than Travelocity, etc. does. When I was searching for flights to Sarajevo, *not * an easy chore, they came up with one on Italia $300 cheaper than I was able to get on Italia. It would have cost me another $10 fee for them to book it, but it worked fine. Same thing when I went to London a couple years ago. I found $600, they found $420 + $5 fee on AirIndia, not the best airline but I’m still alive.
Use everything at your disposal, you’ll never know what will work. and then 12 months later, for your next trip it will all be different, so use everything at your disposal again.
You can always look at the airplane ticket auctions available on skyauction.com. It’s kind of like ebay for the travel industry. We got our tickets to China last fall on skyauction for $150 less per ticket than any other site.
I’ve been working within travel industry for about 10 years so I can def. answer this with the following rule of thumb:
Within the US, (and for SOME European destinations) buy online.
For international flights, use either an ETHNIC agency that specializes on the destination you’re going to or find an agent that knows what they’re doing well enough to shop consolidator rates.
The long version:
Agencies with a large volume to specific destination tend to have agreement called (at least in Ontario) consolidator fares that allow them to sell a specific airline’s tickets at lower rates than even the airline itself. The “discount” fares you see online are often consolidator fares that the online agency has negotiated with the carrier (airline) due to volume of sales. The argument is simple, the airline doesnt have to pay someone a salary to deal with the customer (the agency does all the work).
Within the US in particular (and to lesser extents Europe and Canada) there are a crapload of smaller carriers competing with the big boys. Competition therefore drives down the costs to an extent that few agencies bother to work within. (The profit on individual sales are pitifully small, often less than 10 dollars).
On international fares, however, things are a little different. Far less competition is involved (often less than 4 or 5 carriers working the route) and often the country carrier has an unfair advantage. For example, some Central American carriers have fares that are significantly lower than their american counterparts, serving the same routes. This is often a result of subsidies from home gov’ts as a way to compete against the bigger US or European carriers. What this means, however, is that these specific carriers tend to try to increase their shares to the home country by offering VERY nice deals to agencies that sell their home market. For some reason, these contracts often specifically state that you can’t sell the rates online. Don’t really know why, but the point is that they would not be available for online purchase. A lot of the Asian carriers are the same way.
So in your case, try to find an agency that services the asian market (not necessarily Thailand, although depending on the Thai population in your area it may be a worthwhile option) and see what you can find. Even if there aren’t any agencies dealing with that market any agent worth their salt will know to search with the consolidators (companies that specialize in selling discount air to AGENTS for resale) who do. This is not something you can do online very easily.