Who do you use to book travel?

[matt215]

I've used Travelocity and Expedia, but then when I discuss airfare to a particular location with other divers, I find that they have often used other sites or companies to,arrange travel, and often get better rates or more convenient travel schedules.
so, who do you use to book your dive travel air?

 

[muzikbiz22]

I search on Kayak and American Express Travel, then book on AmEx website, (with my AmEx or points). Perks, points, freebies, travel insurances built in, peace of mind, etc.

 

[Mike]

I use Matrix software to figure out air travel and book it directly with the airline. Airlines are moving to the model of cutting out the resellers. They guarantee the lowest prices by booking directly through them now. Some even are penalizing you through 3rd party sites by not offering seat availability, extra charges for baggage or not giving miles. I usually book direct with the hotel/resort also. Many of them are going to the same model as the airlines, with guaranteed lowest rates by booking direct. Last trip to Florida Keys the best room rate at the place we wanted to stay that I could find anywhere online was about $2800 for the week. Went to the resorts website and they had a special listed for exact same beach side room for 15% off which was $420.00 savings.

In my opinion the travel sites are most of the time the worst method to book with.

1) You can do better booking direct
2) Hotels hold it against you when they get your reservation through the travel sites. (some people say no way, but it's been proven over and over again that it does happen)
3) Most of the 'best' deals through the travel sites are not the optimum types of rooms or flights, crappy locations in the hotel, and weird flight schedules, that's basically a big part of how they give 'deals' by offering the stuff the hotels and airlines have a hard time getting rid of.

Just got back from Breckenridge over X-mas, wife booked the room through travelocity. Arrived at this nice hotel, all valet service, right on the slope, with a lift to the slopes, etc.... go to room and it's a freak'n nasty handicapped room, felt like we were staying at a nursing home over Christmas instead of a 4 star resort. That's when I asked my wife how she booked the place and she told me travelocity. God damn them but it's our own fault. No way to change rooms during solid booked week of Christmas. But wifey got a deal on the price.

 

[ScubaSteve1962]

Like Mike I use the air and hotel websites. I've only used a vacation website once, didn't get to use my hotel upgrade, or accrue points. The only thing I will use hotwire for is car rental. But most of the time I use the car rental websites also.

 

[yodelhawk]

For years we used sites like Expedia and Priceline and never had any trouble. One of our friends is connected in the airline industry and warned us about going this route. She said that we may save a few bucks, but if there is ever a problem, the folks that booked this way go to the bottom of the "We will help you" list. Well, about 3 years ago "it" hit. We were coming back from and overseas vacation when we realized that the last leg of our trip, did not exist. Even tho we had flight numbers and times printed out and verified 2 days before flight. Costumer service was a joke. The person spoke such bad English that the wife gave up and let me handle the communication. Wound up costing us an extra day, more money and a few favors from friends to come pick us up at an airport 90 miles from our hometown.
Since then we have been going through a travel agent. The service is great, if you do a little research they will usually be able to match the price on the internet and you have the piece of mind that there is somebody in your corner.

 

[Damselfish]

A good thing to do is check out local tourism sites and websites of hotels at your destination, including ones you're not necessarily staying at. Usually some will have a good web page on "how to get here." Many places are serviced by airlines that don't show up on sites like Travelocity or Kayak, so you need to know to look other places. They may also tell you useful things like the ferry you didn't know about, or maybe to avoid the ferry, or that you can use some local airline but they're impossible to book on your own from overseas and it's better for someone there to do that part for you, etc. etc.

 

[matt215]

Well, I've tried to book directly with the airlines sites, but they don't always fly to the locations I'm looking for (ex: places in Indonesia.) When I plug in the destination city on sites like expedia or travelocity, they come back with a complete itenerary that gets me where I want to go. Obviously there are multiple airlines involved, but it works. And I get my bags checked all the way to my destination. So I tried to do the same thing on American's and United's website (they were the first airline that I was flying on for this hypothetical trip.) Both airlines gave me an error message saying that they don't fly to my destination, but when I checked their partner airlines, the airline I needed to get there (Singapore Airlines/ Silk Air) were listed. So I'm having problems making this work. Grrrr......

 

[robint]

We have almost always booked using Expedia, but after having to cancel a trip recently and the nightmare that has occurred from it, we are thinking we won't go that way any more.

 

[Mike]

Well, I've tried to book directly with the airlines sites, but they don't always fly to the locations I'm looking for (ex: places in Indonesia.) When I plug in the destination city on sites like expedia or travelocity, they come back with a complete itenerary that gets me where I want to go. Obviously there are multiple airlines involved, but it works. And I get my bags checked all the way to my destination. So I tried to do the same thing on American's and United's website (they were the first airline that I was flying on for this hypothetical trip.) Both airlines gave me an error message saying that they don't fly to my destination, but when I checked their partner airlines, the airline I needed to get there (Singapore Airlines/ Silk Air) were listed. So I'm having problems making this work. Grrrr......

Use the Matrix software, it will give you the actual flight numbers. Once you have flight numbers you're golden with whatever you want to do. You can easily plug them into the airlines website.

Even if you don't want to book directly with the airlines, flight numbers are very valuable since if you want to do comparisons, if you have the flight numbers you're comparing apples to apples on other web sites.

Matrix - ITA Software

You can search the exact dates, or blocks of dates around when you want to go to see how pricing is effected simply by different combinations of days leaving and arriving, you can sort by direct flights, 1 stop, 2 stop, 3 stop, with nearby airports, by price, by shortest flight duration, it's almost endless the abilities that software will give you.

 

[ajtoady]

I travel quite a bit and have found that contacting the hotel directly will almost always result in some savings. Talk to the manager and ask for some rates based on towels or sheets changed every three or four days instead of the daily service. Most hotels will consider the savings in payroll when you are willing to use the same towel for a few days and not having to clean up the entire room. I can usually negotiate around a 20% weekly savings. More money to spend on diving goodies.