I'm a travel junkie who is hooked on deals from YYC. Here are my current favorite ways to search (updated June 2013)....
Google Flights Explorer - Google bought ITA Software (which gave them access to nearly all airfare data) a while back, and is starting to offer some interesting interfaces for browsing it. It's never been so fast or easy to browse airfare data across a large range of dates.
ITA Software
Has kind of been superseded by Google's new interfaces, which is accessing the same data, but some people still prefer it. Unfortunately, the old Matrix interface is no longer available, which had some powerful capabilities for advanced search users.
Kayak
Often after narrowing down my dates, I like to use Kayak, because of the excellent filters you can use (ie: travel time, stopovers, etc). Try a search with 3 days of flexibility on either side of your dates. The
Kayak Explore Map is also handy.
SkyScanner
Particularly strong for searching flights on the budget airlines within Europe. You can also search country to country (ie: Italy to France) to discover the cheapest cities to fly in and out of.
Facebook
I've set up a page on Facebook for anyone that's interested in being alerted instantaneously to any deals from Calgary. (I only post the deals that are truly great).
YYC Deals Facebook Page
You can also be alerted by e-mail whenever a truly amazing travel deal from Calgary is found.
YYC Deals Email Alerts
There's also a Facebook group which is a community that revolves around discussion of travel deals specifically from Calgary, or getting unbiased travel advice in general.
YYC Deals Facebook Group
Baggage Fee Chart
http://www.airfarewatchdog.com/blog/...ge-fees-chart/
All Inclusive Packages
The
Ultimate All Inclusive Deal Finder lets you do some interesting things, like searching as wide a date range as you want to help locate the best deals, and picking precisely which destinations you want to compare against each other.
It also compares the millions of package prices from the Canadian Tour Operators against the millions of TripAdvisor reviews for the resorts and assigns each deal a score, to help determine precisely which deals are currently the best for the money (ie, the price is currently a lot lower than it should be relative to the quality of the resort involved).
Do you have a favorite way you like to search for travel deals? Reply in the thread below!