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Stretch your travel dollar

Travel tools can save you money, check the weather

By Scott Mccartney, The Wall Street Journal

Published January 5, 2009 at 12:05 a.m.

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They won't stop snowstorms that disrupt travel for fliers, but some new travel tools can make it easier for you to snag frequent-flier award seats, find cheap fares, book some perks for yourself and even make your trip a lot more enjoyable. There are even ways to try to avoid getting stranded by bad weather.

It's a good time to revamp how you go about planning trips and buying tickets. Here are some favorites worth considering to improve your trips and ticket-buying.

* Yapta.com, a Web site that can track fares on specific routes and dates for you, added a new feature this fall that can alert you when airlines make new seats available at the lowest-priced frequent-flier award levels. Even though you may find a certain flight unavailable for the cheapest frequent-flier awards, the inventory can change, and if the flight sells slowly and empty seats are available, airlines often open up frequent-flier seat inventory. Unless you constantly check, you'd never know. But now Yapta can check for you.

The service, now in beta testing, is available on Yapta's free Web site. So far it works only with United, Delta, Continental and Alaska airlines, as well as US Airways.

* ExpertFlyer.com, a subscription Web site favored by hard-core road warriors who mine the intricacies of airline fare codes and upgrade rules, has a more sophisticated "Award and Upgrade Availability" search function. You can search for coach, business-class or first-class awards at different price levels on different airlines, and search for upgrade opportunities as well.

ExpertFlyer, which costs $9.99 a month for full access or $99.99 a year, can search the available inventory of 21 carriers worldwide, including Alaska, American, Delta, Frontier, Northwest and United airlines. The Web site also has an alert feature that will e-mail you when seats become available on a specific flight at a specific award or price level you want.

* Kayak.com, a useful fare-search site that checks lots of different vendors, from airlines themselves to online travel agencies like Orbitz.com and Travelocity.com, offers some handy tools to refine your flight searches.

If you don't want to consider turboprop aircraft or regional jets, for example, Kayak lets you exclude those flights from your searches. Kayak breaks down available itineraries by airline, time of day, number of stops and how long layovers might be. And Kayak has a one-click feature that opens a chart showing you airline fees - now a crucial element when comparing prices between airlines.

* FareCompare.com has a couple of useful tools to help make smarter ticket-buying decisions. One option shows historical graphs of the lowest prices offered on a route, looking back at what airlines offered over the past seven days all the way out to the past two years. If you can see that the price hasn't been below $200 over the past two years, you may be foolish to hope for a $150 ticket on a particular route. Another useful FareCompare function: A search for discounted first-class seats. Just enter your departure city and FareCompare can show you discounted first-class seats to hundreds of different destinations.

If you're after the cheapest possible coach ticket, consider buying from a "consolidator." You can find offerings through AirlineConsolidator.com and usaca.com. Consolidators take seats that airlines don't think they can sell and offer them at very steep discounts. Moving the seats out of regular inventory means airlines don't have to slash their posted prices and trigger fare wars with competitors. But the distressed inventory gets sold, much like a retailer dumping excess inventory at the outlet mall.

A warning about consolidator tickets, however: You have very few rights when you fly. You likely won't get perks like frequent-flier mileage credit or advance seat assignments, and you will be at the bottom of the list for re-accommodation if flights get canceled or connections are missed.

Always check the weather at your destination and any connecting cities, and see if your airline can reroute you away from trouble before you get caught sleeping on a cot at Chicago O'Hare for two days. Fly.faa.gov offers a handy map with current information about the status of major airports, such as ground-delay programs in force that will delay your takeoff.

Always sign up for flight alerts from your airline or FlightStats.com so you get early notice of cancellations, gate changes or delays. Flight alerts are also helpful when picking people up at airports, too.