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Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Travel experts, an air fare question.
Any tricks or tips for finding good prices for air fare? I am dreaming about some traveling.
Re: Travel experts, an air fare question.
You might need to be more specific. Do you just mean in general, or do you have a location in mind? Do you want last-minute, or specific dates, or sometime in a particular month...?
If you haven't heard of Kayak, I like them and have found better deals there (sometimes) than other search engines I was familiar with.
I like the Orbitz grid view where you can see a whole week's or month's worth of fares depending on the date.
Airfare Watchdog's Twitter account often tweets some amazing sales.
American Airlines and Southwest (and maybe others?) don't have their flights included on search sites like Orbitz, Hotwire, etc., so you have to go to their sites directly to search fares. Of course, Southwest doesn't fly to GRR so that one is a moot point for me. Not sure about DET for you.
#1: Be flexible. The more flexible you are in terms of dates and destinations (and airports, too--check out park sleep fly deals, sometimes they make driving a few hours to an airport worth it), the better price you'll find. Always use the +/- days feature of a search to see if that makes a difference in fare. Generally, Tues, Wed and Sat are cheaper days to fly than Fri, Sun, Mon.
#2: Subscribe to travel emails. I like Travelzoo. They regularly send out deals. I also get emails from the frequent flier programs I'm enrolled in--Delta and Southwest.
#3: Buy either way in advance if you have a good idea of price range for tickets to that destination (like more than 6 mos) or within 60 days of travel. It's a good idea to check once a week for a few weeks to get a benchmark for prices. You can also use Kayak's calendar feature to see where prices have been falling. Be patient and here's where flexibility comes in if some other destination or date runs a hot deal. Conventional wisdom says that Wednesdays are the best day to buy tickets because of how airlines run sales.
Hope that helps! We rarely pay more than $200 pp to fly anywhere, except Europe and we've flown there for ~$600 pp twice if that lends to my credibility at all.
I think you meant DTW
You've received good advice already.
The only thing that I have to add is that if you have a destination in mind -- or a few destinations -- set up airfare alerts on either Kayak or Yapta or both.
This is how we found a great deal on our Hawaii airfare. We had an alert set up to let us know when prices dropped below a certain price.
You can also set them up so that you receive weekly (or daily) price alerts no matter what. This is helpful so that you get a feeling of what standard prices are and what's considered a good deal.
Heh. Yep. Thanks, obnoxious congestion, for the brain fuzziness!
One of the useless bits of knowledge in my brain is an obscene amount of airport codes. I'm hoping that some of them clear out in order to make room for Federal Rules of Civil Procedure...
And boo to congestion/brain fuzziness!