Change Your Habits to Save on Airfare

Make some sacrifices and you'll find some good airfare deals.

ByABC News
June 10, 2008, 4:26 PM

June 11, 2008 — -- Yes, flying is not fun these days. No one thinks "barrel of monkeys" anymore it's more akin to a cage of crazed wolverines, both on the plane and behind the scenes.

We see the airlines fumbling around, trying to eke out a buck in a business model predicated on cheap fuel. The results those higher ticket prices, fuel surcharges and pesky add-on fees have most of us wondering if any "deals" still exist.

Amid all this doom and gloom, I am here to tell you there actually are air travel deals out there. You just have to recognize them when you see them.

Coming across an exceptional airfare deal used to be like finding that one, exquisite rose in a field of summer wildflowers. Now, it's more like stumbling over a dandelion in the desert. It's not as pretty as last year's crop, but it sure beats anything else out there.

And face it, we had a superb run with incredibly cheap airline tickets for years, but those days are gone (at least for the foreseeable future). An analyst recently noted that capacity cutbacks beginning this fall will take us back to 1998 levels of available seats, effectively wiping out 10 years of growth. So, we must deal with reality, and the reality is the boom years are over.

OK, no more boom but I can still hear little explosions: the celebratory sound of "good" deals popping up again, good not great. But that is what we have to work with, so let's talk about how to find such deals and what frugal fliers should be aware of.

1. Don't give up. Our fascination with finding a good travel deal started when the Internet gave us the gift of quick comparison shopping: younger people have no idea how amazing it initially was to see multiple airline prices all at the same time. Once airlines let this "comparison genie" out of the bottle, finding cheap airline ticket deals was a snap.

Now it isn't quite so easy. Airlines have several years under their belts of studying our air travel shopping patterns, and they've been using that knowledge to extract more "coin" from us (and they were doing this even before the run-up in fuel prices turned the industry on its head).