11 top tips for buying airfares

Here are some great tips on purchasing airfare and finding great prices on your flights, from MSNBC:

Airfarewatchdog.com has gathered some additional advice that might save you money next time you’re shopping for a plane ride.

Check fares often
Because airfares fluctuate like the stock market, you need to check them every day, or better still several times a day, if you’re serious about saving money. Airlines can update domestic fares three times a day during the week, and once on Saturday and Sunday (international fares tend not to change as often, but can be updated up to 5 times daily). Also, even if the fare itself hasn’t changed, seat availability at the lowest fares can change, so there might be just one seat available at 10 a.m., but the airline will open up more cheap seats later in the day.

Sign up for the airlines’ e-mail feeds and frequent flyer programs
Yes, we know, you already get too much e-mail, but the airlines want to develop a one-on-one relationship with you, so they’ll send you special deals, such as 50 percent off promo codes or two-fers, if you sign up. Airline sites sell much more than airfares these days (hotels, rental cars, credit cards and such), and they will entice you to deal direct rather than use a third party site such as Orbitz. Here are links to U.S. domestic airline sign-up pages and for international sign-ups. If you’re on Twitter, you might also want to follow the airlines’ tweets, which they’re using to promote exclusive Twitter-only deals. We signed up for Virgin America’s frequent flyer program and because we haven’t flown them yet we keep on getting promo code discount offers to give them a try.

Read the rest: 11 top tips for buying airfares - Tips- msnbc.com

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