Editor's note: This article originally appeared on the Web site, Airfare Watchdog, which is updated daily; www.airfarewatchdog.com
Readers often ask for a strategy for finding the lowest airfare. After years of researching fares for AOL's Digital City "Travel Guy" site, and now at AirfareWatchdog.com, Kim Liang and Gabriel Leung, my research partners, go about it this way:
Stop No. 1 is Travelocity. We click on the flexible date option and then enter the cities and hit "select," which produces a calendar of supposedly available dates for the fare.
As much as we love Travelocity, you can't take every fare that pops up at face value. Sometimes fares, or even routes, don't exist. That being said, Travelocity has the most versatile flexible-date-search mechanism, and it will give you a good place to start (and, often, to end) your search. Sometimes adjusting your dates even by one day can save you hundreds of dollars.
Also, Travelocity no longer includes America West's and Spirit Airlines' fares in these flexible searches. For that reason, you need to check CheapAir, which has a good flexible-date option (click on the "My dates are flexible" box).
CheapAir includes every domestic carrier, it seems, except JetBlue and Southwest. Unfortunately, CheapAir only provides flexible search for domestic and Canadian flights, not international ones, which Travelocity does include.
Expedia used to have a well-hidden fare-listing tool with an ungainly URL, so that you could see the lowest fare in a market, irrespective of travel dates. But it seems that Expedia didn't want anyone to know this search feature is now defunct. That's a shame, because Expedia sometimes lists deals that Travelocity does not.
Expedia does provide a flexible-search capability on a limited number of popular domestic routes, however. Click under "More flight search options . . . Flexible dates" to use it.
True, Orbitz also has a flexible fare search, and you can depend on the availability of the fares Orbitz produces in searches. But its flexible search is not as robust as Travelocity's, which shows fares, if available, beyond Orbitz' flexible date search of just 30 days beyond your preferred dates.
If your travel dates have no flexibility at all, then we recommend Sidestep, a search site that includes JetBlue Airways fares, which Travelocity, Orbitz and Expedia do not.
Then then there's Southwest. Because Southwest is a major carrier to Tampa International, you should perform a separate search at this carrier's Web site, www.southwest.com and you should sign up for Southwest's free "Ding" fare service. These fares are sent out once or twice a day and pop up on your computer it doesn't work on Macs; just PCs, and only with certain operating systems. The fares typically expire the same day they are posted but are generally 10 to 25 percent lower than normal Southwest sale fares.
But your search parameters don't end there.
Other airlines also reserve their best fares their own Web sites, so that they will not be displayed in any other search.
Aer Lingus often has fares to Ireland that are lower than fares listed on other sites, and Alaska Airlines recently ran a sale appropriately called the "Only Here" sale because the fares - in some cases half of what others were charging for the same routes - were only available on Alaska's Web site.
So, if you're a real fare hound, you'll check on individual airline sites as well.
Is all this keyboarding worth your time? That's for you to say. Sometimes you'll save $50, but the savings can be much greater, and they can really add up if there is more than one person traveling.
