Some ways to get a lower price on Airfare

[dnoblett]

Time had an article on ways to get a lower price, the secret has to do with where (What Country) you appear to be buying the ticket from. I learned this one first hand this past summer, my wife had me buy a RT ticket for her sister to go to Shanghai to meet and accompany Mum back to Guilin. I booked her a ticket on China Eastern for around $400, my wife said her sister could get it for $200 in Guilin, I got a refund, and she booked it there.

 

Anyway here is Time Mag post. http://time.com/3626031/fake-location-cheaper-plane-tickets/

 

 

Use a ‘Fake’ Location to Get Cheaper Plane Tickets

 

Most people don’t know there is a simple trick to get a cheaper flight on an airline’s website

 

I can’t explain airline pricing but I do know some plane tickets can be cheaper depending on where you buy them or, even better, where you appear to buy them from. This is all about leveraging foreign currencies and points-of-sale to your advantage.

 

For reasons I never quite understood, every time I tried to book a domestic flight in another country, the prices were always exorbitant. But, say, once I was in Bangkok, that same flight that was once $300 would fall to $30 almost inexplicably. This phenomenon is because a ticket’s point-of-sale—the place where a retail transaction is completed—can affect the price of any flight with an international component.

 

Most people don’t know there is a simple trick for “changing” this to get a cheaper flight on an airline’s website; it’s how I managed to pay $371 for a flight from New York to Colombia instead of $500+. Though it can be used for normal international flights, it often works best when you’re buying domestic flights in another country. (Point in case: A Chilean friend once told me Easter Island flights were much cheaper to buy in Santiago instead of abroad.)

 

To demonstrate how this scheme works, we ran a one-way search from Cartagena to Bogotá—two cities in Colombia—for June 17 on Google ITA, Kayak and Skyscanner. To keep things simple, I’ll ignore a VivaColombia flight that Skyscanner found because Google ITA and Kayak do not include smaller airlines in their searches. Instead, we’ll be comparing two large airlines that fly this route, LAN Airlines and Avianca.

 

Unsurprisingly, Kayak takes a U.S.-centric approach. Going the path of least resistance, a Kayak search shows that the cheapest flight on LAN is $116 and the cheapest flight on Avianca is $137. If we run this exact search in Google ITA with New York City as the point-of-sale, we see those exact numbers. Skyscanner returns similar results: the cheapest flight on LAN is $114 and on Avianca it is $136.

 

 

Though Skyscanner actually has the best prices, let’s not stop there. Instead of using an American city as the point-of-sale, let’s use Colombia as the point-of-sale, something that can only be searched for in Google ITA. You actually don’t have to tweak a thing because the departure city is usually set as the default for this option — that said, it’s possible to change this to any place in the world you want. The main difference is we’ll get the price in Colombian pesos and that’s *exactly* what we want.

 

 

In this new search, the cheapest flight on Avianca is 116,280 COP and the cheapest flight on LAN is 173,820 COP. That of course means a lot of mumbo jumbo to most people, so let’s convert that over to U.S. dollars. The same Avianca flight now approximates to $61.59 while the LAN flight is $91.96. In short, you’d be saving $22.04 on the LAN flight and $74.41 on the Avianca flight by simply paying in a different currency. The price difference between the cheapest flight in both the U.S. and Colombia search is $54.41. That’s how much you’ll end up saving just by comparing the flights in different currencies.

 

 

Now the real problem is that we’ve got to find a place to buy this ticket in pesos since Google ITA won’t tell us where to go for that. I head directly to the Avianca website, which brings us to the U.S. price—about $137—for the flight. That’s not what I want though. I start again, but this time I click on the upper right-hand corner and select Colombia as my country and English as my language. (Other airlines may not always offer the ability to keep using the site in English. How good is your Spanish?) It’s not using the same thing as a VPN, but this mimics the idea that you are buying from a different location other than the U.S.

 

I search again. Sometimes I’m not always able to get the same exact fare I see in Google ITA, but I almost always manage to get something cheaper than what Kayak calculated for me. In this case, the cheapest flight available is 136,000 COP or $72.14, a bit more than what I was told but still less than Kayak’s price. To save the most money, make sure you pay in a credit card that doesn’t charge foreign transaction fees. In total, I manage to get a flight about $43.86 cheaper than what any U.S. site quoted me.

 

 

Even if you don’t have a travel-friendly credit card, it still might be worth it to pay the fees just to pay in pesos. In this case, the standard foreign transaction fee 3% surcharge would only cost you an extra $2.16 to book the flight. The exact percentage will vary depending on the terms of the card issuer, but in short, you still come out ahead.

 

With a little adjustment, this trick can also be used for purchasing international flights. The most obvious points-of-sales to check for generally include the destination country and the country where the airline is based in. I mean, you can also go ahead and check for every single country out there, but that’s real dedication that even I don’t have time for.

 

Though most of the time it works out that I get some sort of discount—which can range from a few dollars to over a hundred dollars—by leveraging foreign currencies against each other, it doesn’t always work all the time. Sometimes, in fact, the cheapest airfare is the most straightforward fare you’ll find. But hey, just so you know.

 

 

 

[Thomas Promise]

Beat me to it. I just read the same article.

[danb]

Hi !! I tried to do as the author said in his article. I looked for tickets from Shanghai to Nanning. Going on Dec 20 and returning on Jan 20. I did this on Google travel, ITA travel and Ctrip. For ITA I did a search in US dollars and also did the search in Yuan and booking from from Nanning. I was getting price of 575 USD or 3540 yuan using Google travel or ITA. The prices were the same. From what I recall if i did an added leg with Delta, the Shanghai to Nanning leg was going to raise my ticket price by 500 USD dollars. Booking it thru CTrip the price should be about 1200 yuan. Personally speaking I believe what the difference is the fact that I am going thru a Chinese travel site. AAhhhhh I was going to try to prove my point and I ran the numbers on FlyChina site and the prices were 575 USD. For haha's I then tried elong site. Their price was 1299 + some fees in yuan. Maybe fly China is not a real China site. I don't know. If I am trying to book a domestic Chinese site I like using Ctrip. Maybe I wasn't doing the search correctly but I thought I was. DanB

[Randy W]

Hi !! I tried to do as the author said in his article. I looked for tickets from Shanghai to Nanning. Going on Dec 20 and returning on Jan 20. I did this on Google travel, ITA travel and Ctrip. For ITA I did a search in US dollars and also did the search in Yuan and booking from from Nanning. I was getting price of 575 USD or 3540 yuan using Google travel or ITA. The prices were the same. From what I recall if i did an added leg with Delta, the Shanghai to Nanning leg was going to raise my ticket price by 500 USD dollars. Booking it thru CTrip the price should be about 1200 yuan. Personally speaking I believe what the difference is the fact that I am going thru a Chinese travel site. AAhhhhh I was going to try to prove my point and I ran the numbers on FlyChina site and the prices were 575 USD. For haha's I then tried elong site. Their price was 1299 + some fees in yuan. Maybe fly China is not a real China site. I don't know. If I am trying to book a domestic Chinese site I like using Ctrip. Maybe I wasn't doing the search correctly but I thought I was. DanB

 

 

FlyChina is located in Boca Raton, FL. You can check 'About Us' or 'Contact' pages for information about a particular site. For Chinese web sites actually hosted in China, you will see an ICP number at the bottom of the page. The ctrip English-language site says, "Ctrip.com International Ltd. (CTRP), founded in 1999, is headquartered in Shanghai, China.", but the Chinese language site has the ICP number.

 

The point is - SHOP AROUND by any means available. This is simply another way of doing so. I can occasionally find better prices on Travelocity than my wife sees on Ctrip - usually not.

[NickF]

Interestingly, when I was shopping for fares for ChunMei in September I tried both FlyChina and Kayak and got exactly the same fares and flights.

[dnoblett]

Interestingly, when I was shopping for fares for ChunMei in September I tried both FlyChina and Kayak and got exactly the same fares and flights.

Typically the above trick would result in different prices in these senarios.

• Domestic flights Booking a domestic flight in China may be cheaper if done Locally in China using a China based agency or site than from overseas in the USA
• International flights originating in China if booked locally in China using a China based agency or site may be cheaper than booking it from overseas in the USA

Sometimes you need to do shopping at this end, and have someone in China shop over there and compare prices, Using a VPN that makes it look like you are in the other country and then going to various travel sites may also result in differing prices. I have a plug-in for Chrome Browser called Hola that can be used to fake websites into thinking you are in a different country. https://hola.org/

 

A few times when traveling to China I would book airfar to and from China here in the states RT to and from POE(s) in China, and use a China based agent to book the domestic flights to and from the POE(s)

[Randy W]

Interestingly, when I was shopping for fares for ChunMei in September I tried both FlyChina and Kayak and got exactly the same fares and flights.

 

You may already realize this - these are both U.S.-based services.

[danb]

Hi again, I just did a Shanghai to NYC round trip ticket price check on Ctrip using the same Dec 20 and Jan 20 dates. ( Trying to keeping everything the same at far as travel dates and destinations where possible), Got a price of 5223 yuan. I was trying to reverse the destinations ( NYC to Shangahi) earlier but I could not input the info. Trying to get a good price Priceless....Wow man, what a trip!! hehe. Danb

[Randy W]

Hi again, I just did a Shanghai to NYC round trip ticket price check on Ctrip using the same Dec 20 and Jan 20 dates. ( Trying to keeping everything the same at far as travel dates and destinations where possible), Got a price of 5223 yuan. I was trying to reverse the destinations ( NYC to Shangahi) earlier but I could not input the info. Trying to get a good price Priceless....Wow man, what a trip!! hehe. Danb

 

 

Yes - some of the sites are origination-challenged. For example, Travelocity will only book flights originating from the U.S. There's some sort of restriction there, but it's not clear why they can book a round trip flight from the U.S. to China, and returning to the U.S, but can't book the SAME flights starting in China. They can book a domestic Chinese flight as a LEG of an international flight, but can't book the SAME flight as a stand-alone trip.