There are many ways to buy airplane tickets if you are planning to go on a leisure trip. You can buy airline tickets on the internet, from travels agents or go directly to the airport. Cheap airline fares are also available if you can leave on short notice, but the savings can be quite important. Free airline tickets would be better but how would these companies be able to pay their employees and everything else? For any airline ticket price, you can visit their website and they'll have plenty of information for you to help you decide what you want and where you want to go. You can book airline tickets at the same time, and have them sent over to your place. Airplane travel allows you to go anywhere in the world, but usually you'll end up waiting at several different airports, in transit, while waiting for your next plane to catch. You can always search the internet for a discount airline ticket that will take you where you want to go.
armk posted a photo:
Yesterday we reserved the flight, and this morning we bought the tickets. With these modern "electronic tickets" you don't get those nice slips anymore, just an ugly dot-matrix printout.
We normally fly by Air France, but this time Aeroméxico won out. With all the cost-cutting trends, these two airlines, along with Continental, are the only ones I know of that still preserve the idea of "luxury" that used to be associated with flying. Good food, and service, and such...
Unfortunately, Continental always looses out. Through no fault of its own, but because of the U.S. paranoia we all know and "love" so well :-P. We avoid even skipping through U.S. airports if humanly possible. There's nothing more freakish than having an airport agent, who is obviously a nationalized immigrant (and so very proud of it!), asking you dumb questions about why you wrote down "0" as the answer to how long you plan to stay in his beloved country. I suppose it's somewhat cruel of me, but for some reason they always remind me of Otto from the Simpsons saying "Look at me, man! Now I drive the school bus!"... or maybe they ought to learn to be more polite?
"I'm trying to make a connecting flight out of this country, so if you'll let me be on my way..."
Okay, so the proper answer is to write "In Transit"... but how do you expect me to take these guys seriously when just a few years ago they would ask you in their questionnaires if you were planning to assassinate the President! (I always wanted to answer "Not on this trip" to that one and see what happens! :-D)
By the way, we managed to save 500 € due to a glitch in the fare calculation logic :-)
Airline fares follow obscure rules that often produce surprising results. Within the same class, the price can easily vary five-fold by booking on different dates, or even at different times. Part of the mystery lies in that seats are reserved according to subclasses (those letters you see in parentheses after the class name; the higher the letter the cheaper the fare), so that if your complete itinerary applies to a cheaper subclass (for example, less than one week, over a weekend, less than one month, or more than one month) and there are available seats within that subclass on all your flights, you pay less.
Okay, but sometimes this somewhat faulty logic can get really weird. In this case, extensive searching for flight combinations on the internet let us save 500 € in the total cost by adding a useless loop to our trip: flying from Monterrey to Mexico City, and then returning to Monterrey on the exact same plane that then flies to Madrid (instead of simply boarding that plane when it stops in Monterrey)!
The desk clerk thought our solution was so weird that she offered to clip off the dummy loop from our itinerary while keeping the savings, so now we get to take the direct flight (only) and pay 500 € less than what the computer says. A 25% savings!
Our best idea as to what the fault in the airline's fare logic might be is that by prepending the dummy loop we enter "the system" a few hours earlier, so that our stay at destination computes to a few hours short of the full month, earning us access to seats reserved for a less expensive subclass.
Funny.
I think this is the first time we travel without any connections. A pitty, because traveling with connecting flights is always an adventure. I tell my wife that you know when you leave, but not when, or how, you arrive. Always take with you the indispensables for spending the night at an airport!
