Another Great Airfare Site
Posted by Sandy Miller on Fri, Apr 11, 2008 @ 10:23 PM
A frequent traveling (frugal) friend sent me an email and suggested that I subscribe to Airfare Watchdog. At the time I thought, yeah another site with the same ole stuff...not true. On http://www.airfarewatchdog.com/ there are many different things than you'll find on "purchase" sites. For instance, they have a great blog, a newsletter and they include airlines that the others omit, such as Southwest, Skybus, Allegiant and Jet Blue. Here's a little trivia for you-the reason why nobody else includes Southwest is that Southwest does not allow "automated" checking of their fares and sales. It must be done by a person and Airfare Watchdog must have somebody besides "dogs" working to find the best fares. They also include unpublished sales-don't know how they do that one.
I subscribed an weekly I get an email with fares from the cities that I asked them to monitor for me. Each time I go to their site, I learn something new-today they talked about hidden obnoxious airline fees. They missed one that I found the other day that really irritated me on two fronts.
First, my husband and I needed to fly one way to Boston. I tried MBNA points (since we have over 700,000)...that program stinks. They wanted to charge a surcharge of over $400 because I didn't want to fly the red eye flight they recommend-cheapskates! Then I thought, well, American Express points are pretty bad too....but we might as well spend them vs hard earned cash. I used the Amex but those clowns required 92,000 points (yes, I'm serious for a two one way flights from Reno to Boston)!!! Then, they couldn't get me any reasonable seating. So, I thought-so what, I'm an Advantage Platinum Member, first I'll try the web and then I'll call the Platinum desk. The web wouldn't let me book the exit row seats (said it had a "technical" problem). When I called the Platinum desk-they wanted to charge $5 for each seat assignment!!! Unbelievable!!! I talked them out of it-but it was pretty greedy...because the ticket wasn't booked through them.
Anybody else having these kinds of problems. I think we've found a good "travel point" card that I'll discuss in another blog.
Sandy, agents@nevada.org, 775 882-4641
Resident Agents of Nevada, Inc. http://www.nevada.org/