Business travel and discretionary spending on travel are both down in this recession. This is impacting airlines in a big way, with bargains available for those who are flexible and savvy.

In this situation airlines have two choices — fly less and/or cut fares. So far in 2009 some of the best prices in years have been on offer on some routes. For example earlier in March Iberia offered USA to Europe from as little as US$220 return including taxes.

Here are three useful ways to save with practical tips and examples.

• Be informed – of as many great fare sales as possible.
• Be flexible – to improve your chances of being able to use a sale airfare.
• Airfares may be cheaper from a different departure point.

Be informed

To take advantage you need to be aware of air fare sales.

• Keep in touch with others who are also looking out for great fares to harness the power of thousands of eyeballs searching for bargains. This is most efficiently done through social communities such as twitter (search on fare, deal, #travel or #traveldeals for example) or FlyerTalk (the mileage run deals forum in particular), or through noted consumer sites such as The Perrin Post. You can sign up for alerts at FareCompare which has software continuously searching across all major airlines (mostly limited to routes either to or from USA).



• Sign up for email notifications of as many airlines as possible. Sign up even for airlines you may not wish to fly because many airlines match sale fares offered by other airlines. Reading that one airline is offering a sale on a route you like to fly may give you an early warning (of up to several hours) of a match by an airline which you prefer to fly. It goes without saying that you need to check your email regularly — some sales only last a day.
• Know which low cost airlines fly to places you want to go to, and sign up for their emails in particular. The best fares are only up for very short periods and don’t normally appear on online travel agent sites.
• Find out when airlines release their best sale fares and check their website regularly at that time — for example Virgin Blue has a daily happy hour at 12 noon, Air NZ has $1 reserve international auctions every Thursday (NZ date for flights from New Zealand).

Be flexible

Be flexible with your travel dates or destination, so you can take advantage of sales. I bet many of the people who took advantage of the recent $200-300 fare on American Airlines to Moscow hadn’t been looking specifically for Moscow fares.

Find a cheaper place to start

A trickier way to save is to buy fares from places where they are lower. While it sounds easy it is not always obvious where fares may be lower. For example:

• If you are in USA but close to the Canadian border or go there frequently, check if fares from Canada are cheaper than from USA. They are not normally but could be when a sale or fare war is on.
• Take advantage of indirect competition. For example, British Airways competes with Alitalia in the Italy to USA market – their fares on the route may be lower than Alitalia’s (to compensate for the disadvantage of transferring through London).
• In some cases the fares are so much lower from neighbouring countries or cities as to more than offset the cost of an extra flight to and from the neighbour destination (on a separate ticket). For example, for someone in Australia travelling to Asia it can be cheaper buying a ticket from New Zealand to Asia, and a separate ticket between Australia and New Zealand, than it is to buy a ticket from Australia to Asia. This doesn’t always work – the recent sales between USA and Australia and vice versa were much cheaper than sales between USA and New Zealand.

2009 is the year for bargains

A word of caution. The current situation is unsustainable for most airlines. Some flights have already been cut. The longer the recession lasts the more flights that will be dropped. 2009 may be the time to get the very best bargain airfares before fares get raised again.

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This article was written by Rob, the Global Traveler

The Global Traveller is a travel junkie – if he’s not on a trip he’s planning the next one. He loves to help others travel and experience the world. So far he’s visited over 100 countries. The Global Traveller has a personal blog and co-authors the FlyerTalk blog called The Gate under the handle Kiwi Flyer.