written by Sally Black

• Flights within the United States

  The US government deregulated the airline industry in 1978. Since then, airlines are free to make up their own prices for their airline seats. They must publicly “publish” their fares and file them with government agencies. The airlines publish their fares in “central reservation systems” (CRS) so that their tickets can be sold by “appointed agents.” In the old days, travel agents and airline reservation operators were the only “appointed agents” who had computers and knew the codes that could access CRS published fares. Today most Internet travel sites are basically “bridges” that allow the public access into the same CRS information. Now anyone can go online, search for fares, check availability and have their tickets sent to their door.

• Restricted vs. Non-restricted

  Domestic published airfares are basically full retail fares. There are different prices for different classes of service...obviously you would expect to pay more for first class than for coach. Within each class there are different prices for seats. This has to do with the restrictions associated with a particular ticket. “Unrestricted” tickets offer the freedom to change your mind and switch flights without paying any penalty. Restricted tickets come with a lot of fine print rules and often cannot be changed or there are high fees involved. When you price airline tickets you MUST read and understand the restrictions associated with your ticket purchase. Usually, the lower the price...the more restrictions on that ticket.

• Fees and Taxes

  Besides understanding how restrictions effect the price of a ticket, make sure you take into consideration taxes and associated fees with airline tickets. These charges could substantially increase the final price of a ticket. This is often true of airline ticket sales advertised in the newspaper. The price looks great and then when you read the fine print the actual ticket prices are $50 to $100 more because of taxes and fees. Also realize that when airlines announce these fantastic sales, by law, they only have to allot a small number of seats per flight to be sold at the sale price. Even if you act very quickly, it is often difficult to find seats available for the price advertised.

• Finding the Lowest Fare?

  Often travelers are confused by the line “guarantee the lowest applicable fare.” All that means is that the price offered is the lowest applicable published fare. Big deal! You want an agency that charges less than the published fare. Yes, there are places to find “unpublished” fares, meaning fares lower than the published fares. Unless an agency specifically advertises “negotiated”, “consolidator” prices or “prices lower than the airlines”, you can assume that their offerings are limited to published (retail list) prices.

• What is a Consolidator?
  

  To keep their profits up, airlines want their planes to fly full. They use highly sophisticated systems to calculate and predict their profitability. If they think their planes won't be flying full, then they drop the price on certain seats, add the appropriate restrictions on these tickets and pass this savings off to an agent. In the past, these agents were usually called consolidators and deals like these only applied to International flights. Now the Internet has helped the airlines identify a few big websites that have the ability to move high volumes of seats and help them keep their planes full. As a result, travelers can now find deals on Domestic US airline tickets.

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• The Big Online Travel Sites?

  There are only a handful of websites that have built their own technology to search published airfares. Some are better than others. The big ones are Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz of these “big players” allow other sites to use their technology systems. Each of the big travel websites has thousands of partner or affiliate sites. This makes it even more confusing for travelers. Often while doing their comparison shopping, travelers are actually searching the exact same systems with the exact same fares. The sites look different because of graphics and logos but technologically speaking, it is the same “guts” with the exact same prices.

• How VacationKids.com Makes Its Money

  For the record, there is no price difference whether you buy your ticket through us at Vacationkids or go directly to any of our partner sites. There is no additional saving to be had by going straight to the source. These bigger sites share commissions with us every time you make a reservation. This is how we make money and can afford to create great content, travel planning suggestions and provide inside tips. The reasons the bigger sites offer these programs is because it is actually cheaper to share commissions with partners like us than to pay for advertising to get people to come to their sites directly. It increases sales for them and it is a win-win for affiliates as well as travelers.