Confessions of a YYC Travel Junkie

[Jiggy]

Any recommendations for Montreal, June.25-28th?

[BlackEleven]

Originally Posted by Jiggy

Any recommendations for Montreal, June.25-28th?

I'd also be interested in this (except the other way, Montreal to Calgary) at the end of August.

And what's with the farecompare site? I like it that it notifies me when the price goes down, but it emails me the price is 372, then when I got on the site its 605... bit of a difference there. Done it to me twice now.

[tvp2003]

Sweet... I usually just check Westjet periodically, but it's good to know that deals can be had through other carriers/websites

Originally Posted by cmyden

That's not a bad price, but it's certainly not unusual. Flights to San Diego were going for $277 USD (~$320 CDN) this week, after taxes. Of course, it depends on which days you can fly, midweek is almost always cheaper.

I'm assuming the $320 is for one person -- that's not bad, but nothing like the $202 deal that was available (it was $69 each way, less $25 with their coupon code)...

[cmyden]

And what's with the farecompare site? I like it that it notifies me when the price goes down, but it emails me the price is 372, then when I got on the site its 605... bit of a difference there. Done it to me twice now.

There's advantages & disadvantages to every search engine, none of them are perfect (in my eyes anyways).

The beauty of FareCompare is that I can set it up to monitor every city in the world for price drops, for every date. No other system (as far as I know) will do that. The disadvantage is, often times the alerts are false positives. Sometimes the price drop doesn't really exist, sometimes the price is wrong because it's not calculating the price after taxes/fees. Although, sometimes the fare drop really *is* real, and you'll be the first to know.

I usually use FareCompare as a general world-wide monitoring tool, and if it looks like FareCompare has a bite, I like to verify it on Kayak, which is always correct. If someone could somehow merge the accuracy and filtering tools of Kayak with FareCompare's alert system it would truly be perfect.

[seattleflamer]

You can also try airfarewatchdog which uses real people instead of algorithms to find fares. It is more about quality than quantity so there are fewer teaser/psuedo seat sale.

I'm not sure how good it is for YYC but SEA and YVR have had some really good deals especially internationally. SEA to Paris for <$600 roundtrip back in April.

[seattleflamer]

Try this link http://www.airfarewatchdog.com

[cmyden]

SeattleFlamer: I love the concept of Airfare Watchdog, and I signed up for their deal alert newsletter quite a while ago (be warned, anyone looking to do the same, they send a *lot* of newsletters, pretty much every day).

I've never found any truly tremendous deals thanks to the Watchdog, but I'm always checking it. If I had to bet, I'm guessing the 'real people' over at WatchDog are looking harder for deals from American cities as opposed to Calgary, but I have no proof of that.

I also like to follow their Airfare Watchdog Best Deal of the Day. They're usually meaningless for us Canadians, but I still can't resist looking.

Living in the U.S., you might find the Fare Compare Deal Blog of use. I've seen some amazing deals from American cities this year ($250 return to Moscow anyone?). I see they literally just now posted a deal involving WestJet.... that blog is usually the first one to break the deal info. (Unless you want to follow Rick Seaney himself on Twitter, which can be annoying)

[seattleflamer]

Originally Posted by cmyden

SeattleFlamer: I love the concept of Airfare Watchdog, and I signed up for their deal alert newsletter quite a while ago (be warned, anyone looking to do the same, they send a *lot* of newsletters, pretty much every day).

I've never found any truly tremendous deals thanks to the Watchdog, but I'm always checking it. If I had to bet, I'm guessing the 'real people' over at WatchDog are looking harder for deals from American cities as opposed to Calgary, but I have no proof of that.

I also like to follow their Airfare Watchdog Best Deal of the Day. They're usually meaningless for us Canadians, but I still can't resist looking.

Living in the U.S., you might find the Fare Compare Deal Blog of use. I've seen some amazing deals from American cities this year ($250 return to Moscow anyone?). I see they literally just now posted a deal involving WestJet.... that blog is usually the first one to break the deal info. (Unless you want to follow Rick Seaney himself on Twitter, which can be annoying)

Thanks for the link! I think AFWD has 1 Canadian on staff based out of TO.

I wonder if the issue is there is really only Westjet and AC to choose from for most Canadian destinations. YVR gets a lot of pass through from international airlines and hence more deals. Buddy got YVR to NYC for <$200 on Japan AL.

[cmyden]

CALGARY TO LONDON GATWICK - $561 CDN incl taxes/fees

Can book at CanadianAffair.ca (Thomas Cook airlines)
DEPART: May 23, 28, 29, 30
RETURN: June 4, 5, 11, 12

[icarus]

This is great, thanks so much. I'll definitely have a closer look.

Do you use www.skyscanner.net much? It seems like a pretty good site to me, just wonder how you think it compares to some of the other ones out there.

[cmyden]

Do you use www.skyscanner.net much? It seems like a pretty good site to me, just wonder how you think it compares to some of the other ones out there.

Hi Icarus,

That's my go-to search engine for flights within Europe. I love how you can just input the two countries you want to fly between, and Sky Scanner will figure out the cheapest cities to fly from. Whenever anyone asks me about flights for Europe, that's where I send them! They scan all the inter-europe airlines, including Ryan Air, Easy Jet, etc.

[rockstar]

Originally Posted by cmyden

CALGARY TO LONDON GATWICK - $561 CDN incl taxes/fees

Can book at CanadianAffair.ca (Thomas Cook airlines)
DEPART: May 23, 28, 29, 30
RETURN: June 4, 5, 11, 12

Wow, that's unreal.

[cmyden]

CALGARY TO PHOENIX - $156 USD incl taxes/fees

June 6 to June 13 on US Airways

[icarus]

The Isoprices map is quite fun to use. I don't know how accurate it is for Canada, but fun nonetheless:

http://www.skyscanner.net/flights-fr...om-canada.html

[Maritime Q-Scout]

Really neat idea for a thread. Being a travel junkie (mind you I don't get to do it as often as I like) I really like being able to read about the deals and places to find them.

Just out of curiosity, do you know if there's a Hotwire type site for Canadian Airfare? I checked Hotwire itself but it doesn't have YQY (Sydney) as one of its origin cities. I'm heading up to Halifax for a friend's bachelor party, and if I could get a cheap flight, great.

Might be a problem with only Air Canada Jazz servicing YQY-YHZ, however if there are empty seats?

[icarus]

Originally Posted by Maritime Q-Scout

Really neat idea for a thread. Being a travel junkie (mind you I don't get to do it as often as I like) I really like being able to read about the deals and places to find them.

Just out of curiosity, do you know if there's a Hotwire type site for Canadian Airfare? I checked Hotwire itself but it doesn't have YQY (Sydney) as one of its origin cities. I'm heading up to Halifax for a friend's bachelor party, and if I could get a cheap flight, great.

Might be a problem with only Air Canada Jazz servicing YQY-YHZ, however if there are empty seats?

I noticed today that Air Canada now has non-stop direct flights between Toronto and Sydney, NS (which I hereby dub the Anne Murray Express). You're moving up in the world!

[cmyden]

The Isoprices map is quite fun to use. I don't know how accurate it is for Canada, but fun nonetheless:

http://www.skyscanner.net/flights-fr...om-canada.html

You might like the FareCompare 'Getaway Map'

http://www.farecompare.com/maps/comp...tinations.html

Tell it which city you're looking to leave from, and the map shows you how much it costs to get to each city.

The flight prices are subject to the same inaccuracies that always plague FareCompare (sometimes including tax, sometimes not) but it gives a rough idea.

[Maritime Q-Scout]

Originally Posted by icarus

I noticed today that Air Canada now has non-stop direct flights between Toronto and Sydney, NS (which I hereby dub the Anne Murray Express). You're moving up in the world!

hahaha, that's actually been going on for a few years now. WestJet just started flying into Sydney which actually caused some huge controversy, as the airport bumped out seasonal/charter carrier Sun Wing.

Sydney's caption area is only about 100,000 thus two carriers servicing a Sydney-Toronto flight, and another Sydney-Montreal just doesn't make sense.

Now to have that cheap Sydney-Halifax flight which I so desperately crave. It's flippin' cheaper to fly to Toronto than Halifax!

[Zarathustra]

Awesome thread, had to bump it. Keep us updated, especially with those Europe/Asia flight deals! If I had some extra cash right now I'd book a flight to Tokyo right now!

[enthused]

Man if I could get more time off work right now I'd book that flight to London in a heartbeat! Sweet deal for sure. I just paid a bit less than that for a flight to Montreal... crazy.

Anyways thanks for this thread, I'll definitely be checking out some of the sites posted.