Finding Cheap Flights with AirDig

Here’s the scenario. You’re sitting down to look for a cheap flight from New York to San Francisco two weeks from now. You’re smart so you go to Kayak, put in your airport and dates and wait for the fares to pop up. You also know that there’s no such thing as a sure bet in the airfare game.

You then search a number of competing sites that get slightly different airfare data from the airlines. You go to Orbitz, Cheap Tickets, Expedia and retype your searches into each and every one. You also know Jetblue serves your cities and would like to compare their rates since you like the extra legroom. That’s 5 different sites, 5 different windows, 5 different searches – all taking precious time out of your busy day.

You know rates might be different later this evening and even tomorrow. So later in the day you go through the routine again. And then again tomorrow. Yadda yadda yadda.

Enter AirDig.

You type in your airports and dates once. You’re 1 click away from searching any of the 10 most popular sites on the web. A few clicks later you know the prices from all the important sites on the web. You even take notes in the sidebar so you can compare fares.

Maybe the fares will be lower later today. You come back to AirDig. Your flight info is saved so you’re just 1 click away from all the searches (again). The same tomorrow. You save a ton of time, you find the cheapest possible fare. You fly happy.

W00t! As Jeremy would say “It’s like fishing with dynamite”.

So what are you waiting for? Be one of the first people to take AirDig for a spin. (Oh, and if you like it, please share it with a friend and/or bookmark it and/or blog about it. Thanks!)

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Last month we launched the cheap airfare guide as a side project. Surprisingly enough it received a pretty good response, so we decided to compile our experiences about hotels and launch a similar guide for hotel deals.

Since hotels are so drastically different in nature than airline seats, the process of writing the guide was a bit more difficult. There are a lot more qualitative variables like

• location and proximity to attractions
• amenties like pool, fitness rooms, types of beds
• breakfast, parking charges, etc.
• chains v. independent hotels

So instead of going into all those millions of variables I concentrated on laying out the processes I’ve gone through for finding the best deals by price and location from my own experiences. If you like the hotel guide and find it useful, I’d appreciate a Digg or a Del.icio.us bookmark. If you have feedback or additions, feel free to shoot them my way.

Coincidentally I received an invite to VibeAgent.com last month from Guillaume of Hotel Blogs. It’s a great new website based around hotel reviews and a community of frequent travelers. So far I’ve left 2 reviews of my own and plan to use it in the future to find hotel recommendations. It’s a really well executed site.

I’d say check it out, but it’s in a closed invite-only beta. I have a few invites left though, so if you want to get on the inside, shoot me a note and I’ll send you one (if I still have any left by then).

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About 10 days ago I picked up a copy of the 4 Hour Workweek on Audible (mp3/ipod version of the book on tape). I was already in a “let’s do something with life” kick, and that book really kicked me into high gear.

After buying it, I got in the car with my girlfriend and drove to West Palm Beach so I could getaway and listen to the book at the same time. We stayed at the Tropical Gardens Bed and Breakfast with our friends Steve and Evie and went snorkeling the next day. It only took one day but it was a great mini vacation – and I was able to listen to the audiobook.

A few days later I went to the mountains of North Carolina and spent 4 days at the lake relaxing with the rest of the AU crew. (Hence the recent lack of posting)

If you haven’t read or listened to it yet, I highly recommend the 4 Hour Workweek – it’s filled with great advice and resources. After listening to it and having some time off to let it settle in, I’m still a big fan. While some of the concepts may seem far fetched, they are definitely achievable. I don’t want to appear like an overzealous evangelist so I’ll let you decide for yourself, but I personally found the book very inspiring.

Has anyone else read the book? I’d love to discuss it with others who have.

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At the begining of this year, I wrote an article titled How to find the Cheapest Flight Every Single time, which proved to be quite popular.

For months now I’ve been planning on revisiting that post to include a little bit more information from all the feedback I’ve received as well as other helpful tips I found around the web regarding budget travel.

My goal was to create a more focused reference page that I could use and share with others, instead of just a blog post (which is temporal by nature). You can see the new guide here: Best Sites for Cheap Flights: Tips for Finding the Lowest Airfare.

I’ve included tips for domestic as well as international flights as well as some basic strategies to help you find the best cheap fares online.

One of my favorites is the “one-way flight” trick. Here’s my real life example:

Last month I booked a flight from Sarasota to New York City with less than two weeks before my departure date. (I always wait until a week or two before and still find great deals). Tampa is about 50 miles away and is almost always $100 less expensive per round-trip flight than Sarasota, but I much prefer flying out of Sarasota because it’s much closer and I save on parking fees by having a friend drive me.

I love flying Jetblue. They are by far my favorite airline – lots of legroom, the flight attendants are awesome, you have your own little tv with 30+ channels. Last year they started offering direct flights from Sarasota (SRQ) to New York City (JFK) so I always check them first. They split their fares up into one way routes. As is often the case – the cheapest leg to NYC was $229 but the cheapest leg back was $99.

The flight back was a good deal, so I kept that window open and went over to Orbitz to find a one way flight from SRQ to any destination in New York. I ended up finding a direct flight from SRQ to Newark on Continental for $89.

I booked the flight from Sarasota to Newark on Continental and the one-way flight from JFK to Sarasota on Jetblue, both direct flights (and one of them on my favorite airline). My total cost with taxes was $209. Booya!

Anyway, that’s just my most recent example of finding the best deal available. I hope you find the new cheap flights guide useful and can use it to save some money yourself. If you have any advice, feedback, or experiences of your own you’d like to share, I’d love to hear it. I may add to and edit that page as time goes on to keep it useful and up to date.

Oh, and after you find your perfect flight, check out Vanessa’s travel tips (via Pronet).

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Last week I was in New York City where I attended the Future of Online Advertising conference and problogger meetup. It was great meeting so many people and hearing about everyone’s projects.

The main takeaways from last week in no particular order:

There’s a huge discrepancy between the blogging world and the old media world. Old money is still very powerful. These media agencies are having a hard time gaining access to the web 2.0 demographic in a meaningful way and on a large scale. It’s not easy to stay relevant in the long tail, while having a meaningful “conversation” across thousands of different blogs and websites. They want to spend the money, but executing it well and tracking it are huge hurdles for them.

Likewise for bloggers, finding advertisers is also a challenge. Most only earn a few dollars a day through adsense. Whoever figures out a way to bridge this gap between old media and new media that does it effectively and are able to scale it will be successful.

There was a lot of talk about video advertising. No one still has the answer on the best way to monetize video traffic. Jay Adelson (of Digg) talked about in-segment sponsorhips as the answer – but I don’t see it as the solution. I agree that pre-rolls and post-rolls are bad staregies, but having my favorite vlogger hoc some Vcast phone erodes their credibility and impartiality (over time). Plus it’s not a good solution for the long tail.

Ryan Carson gave a great real world presentation on how he advertised the Future of Online Advertising conference and what worked (and didn’t work) for them across many different channels. Cross-promotion with other sites and bloggers worked far better than advertising on high-traffic advertising industry sites. This sort of solidified the point that leveraging personal relationships with people you know and cross-promotion are far better strategies than throwing money at mass advertising channels.

It was great meeting and chatting with Darren Rowse. He’s really accessible and cool to talk to. Some other people I met and/or chatted with were Allen Stern (Center Networks), Nick O’Neil (All Facebook), Matt Propst, Mark Phillip (Are You Watching This), Lara Kulpa (anubis marketing), Ann Michael, Simi (A cool Brit), Ari Shohat (di.fm – great techno music), Mike Levin (Hittail), Chris Conley (Startup or Bust), the B5media crew (Chad, Shai, and a few others), Erin Moore (luvmutt.com), Alex Geana, Shona Ridell (Richminx money blog), James Heise (VideoClix), Michael Schneider (Fluidesign, an LA design firm), and the Carson Systems crew (Ryan, Lisa, Gillian, Mel).

Overall it was a good time. It’s far better meeting people in person than online – and even better to have contacts in your field who you know both online and offline.

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I was on vacation last week (hence the lack of posting). I spent a few days in Miami and a few days in West Palm Beach. The lovebugs on the way down were ridiculous.

Before going down I researched hotels and restaurants via Yahoo, Google, Citysearch, and TripAdvisor. I looked at traveler ratings accross these sites to determine what places looked worthy. Maybe I should do a post on “how to find a nice inexpensive hotel” since my “how to get the cheapest flight” post was so well received.

We settled at Winterhaven Hotel, which was very nice for the price (about $80/night). Went to Mansion for the Nelly Furtado afterparty, checked out the Fairchild Botanical Garden, and Miami Seaquarium.

In West Palm Beach, we stayed at the Tropical Gardens Bed and Breakfast, which is run by Steve and Evie – the nicest people ever. I highly recommend staying there if you’re ever in West Palm. We ate at the Il Bellagio (awesome Italian food) and checked out the Norton Museum of Art.

After a few days of work I’ll be traveling again – flying up to New York City for the FOOA conference and Problogger meetup this weekend. Life is good.

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Last year was the first year I really started going to conferences and the first one I attended was the Future of Web Apps Conference in San Franciso. Ryan Carson was the organizer and they put together a really nice event. It was under $600 (which is cheap for conferences) and included a great lineup of speakers including Mike Arrington (TechCrunch), Kevin Rose (digg), and more.

On June 7-8 I’ll be attending the Future of Online Advertising conference in New York City. FOOA is also run by Ryan and the crew so I’m expecting it to be a lot of fun.

It looks like this conference will include more “old media” types along with the web2.0-ers so the change in perspective should be interesting. There’s also a problogger meetup on the 9th, following the conference so I’m looking forward to that as well.

If anyone else wants to sign up and come to NYC for this conference, you can get a 10% discount if you use promo code: 10p3rc. If you’re already going, shoot me and email and maybe we’ll meetup for a coffee or a Guiness.

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Go Gators! The entire AU Interactive crew drove up to Gainesville Monday night to watch the BCS Championship Bowl Between OSU and the Florida Gators. The Gators blew out OSU in a 41 to 14 stunner. We drove through UF and downtown/midtown Gainesville after the game – the celebrations were pretty insane. We’re all high-five’d out.

The next morning we got our championship t-shirts for everyone in the crew, ate at Burrito Brothers, and headed home.

In the less than 24 hours that we were away, MyBlogLog was acquired by Yahoo! Eric, the head honcho at MBL is also a Gator, so “it’s [a] great [week] to be a Florida Gator!” I think it was a great move by Yahoo. MBL has exploded in popularity recently and I think @ $10M it was a good buy for them.

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Update: To always have the latest airfare strategies at your fingertips, bookmark this guide to cheap flights: Tips to Find Cheap Airfare.

Over the last year or two I’ve done my fair share of flying and have refined my methodology of making sure that I always get the cheapest airfare available. I wish I could tell you “use this one service,” but in reality it doesn’t work that way. Since there are so many variables at play, you have to run searches at a number of sites. So how do you get the best airfare?

There are basically three types of airfare websites: 1. Aggregators (ex: Kayak) that check airfares for many different airlines. They do not charge a fee but instead rely on affiliate hotel deals and on-site advertising like Adsense to make their money. These are historically the best bets. 2. Traditional booking engines (ex: Orbitz) that check multiple websites and take a small fee ~$6 in addition to the price of the flight. They process the sale on behalf of the airline and keep the fee. 3. Airline’s own websites (ex: JetBlue). If you find a flight on booking engines, check the airline’s own site so see if you can get it for the same price minus the booking fee. The important subset of this are airlines who do not play nice and do not offer their fares up to aggregators (ex: Southwest). You have to check their sites individually.

In my experience there is no ONE website that you can use to get the lowest airfare every single time. It fluctuates quite a bit because there a LOT of variables involved. Don’t ask me why – it’s just how it is.

My recommendation to get lowest airfare:

• Start with Trip Advisor.
• Search Southwest and Jet Blue.
• Check the old-schoolers: Travelocity, Orbitz, Expedia.
• For good measure (and to be sure) check Cheaptickets, Hotwire, Priceline, Mobissimo, and Trabber.
• If you need to book a hotel with your flight, definitely check Southwest Vacations. They offer some of the best combo deals when purchased with Southwest airline tickets and they’re not available on the other sites.

You can also dig deeper using the quick list on the right. Try different days if you can (one day before/after), nearby airports (usually there’s a checkbox for that), and also check out building the flight with one-ways instead of round trip. This works especially if you have a 3-way flight or find that Southwest has a great 1-way price, but not roundtrip – then you can just use the other engines to get a cheap 1-way flight back.

If you feel really ambitious, check the airline’s own websites – list on the right (sometimes they’ll have unpublished deals).

When you find the cheapest flight that suits your needs, go ahead and book it. One of the things you’ll eventually run into is “oops, that $280 flight is now $320? messages. It will annoy the hell out of you. But that’s just how it is. You might want to check the other aggregators – sometimes you can catch what you just missed on and one and find it on the other.

Since travel is a big industry, there are a lot of shady websites/clubs/etc. that try to get your email address or try to get you subscribed to some service. I’ve never found those very useful for actually finding cheap flighs. The only exception is TravelZoo. I’ve signed up for their weekly Top 20 Travel deals email and I can say I’ve seen some impressive deals there.

Note: The above is mostly for US flights. If you’re looking for International, check out vayama.com, skyscanner.net, momondo.com, and trabber.com (non US). I haven’t tried them myself but I hear they’re good.

Feel free to share your flight booking strategies in the comments or give some travel tips of your own.

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