More Airplanes

Tonight I booked more flights to get me to a conference in south Florida (Boca Raton) in March. To get it at any sort of reasonable price (about C$700), I had to book it as 2 different tickets, one Air Canada YYJ-YVR-SEA and another United SEA-ORD-PBI. Then I had to pick the arrival and departure times to get as nice as possible for switching airlines in SEA. The interesting thing is that the YYJ->SEA flight costs considerably (26%) more than the SEA->PBI flight. That's just crazy, but probably explains why Air Canada actually turns a profit, unlike most airlines.

I'm a bit worried about the return flight as I only have 45 min to switch airlines in SEA. However, I should be able to give United my Air Canada flight details and they will route my bags through correctly. If not, I'll get them eventually. I just hope the flight isn't so late that I miss the connection as Air Canada won't take an excuse of United being late.

As a frequent flier who isn't, I try to get as many miles out of anything I fly. So, originally I had planned on the following itinerary: YYJ-YVR-SEA-SFO-IAD-CLT-PBI + PBI-ORD-SFO-SEA-YVR-YYJ, which, as you can imagine, took quite a while to find and cannot be booked on any website. However, I found that the simple route that I picked above will actually get me about 400 more miles that this crazy mess of 58+ hours of travel time. That's because what I ended up buying was available on the United Airlines website, so I got the booking bonus and such of 2,500 miles for being a new customer.

Anyway, if you are looking for something that is actually useful, here is the best website for finding the cheapest tickets: ITA Trip Planner. What makes it the best is the fact that they don't sell anything. This just searches all of the fares in existence (that aren't sold out) to locate the cheapest price possible. You'd think Expedia, Travelocity or Orbitz would do this, but they don't because they want to make money. If you find a price on that website, then you can book a ticket at that price (+$10 booking fee to talk to a human) by calling the airline reservation desk.

If you want to get really fancy (like me), you can use the advanced options to search for the super huge mileage flights that they don't want you to know about.