Spent time these past
few days pondering the complexities of purchasing an air ticket “the
new way”, via the internet. The on-line market for air tickets is a
like a giant stock exchange ticker board showing the world's travel
carriers and their routes to any conceivable destination. Prices seem
to fluctuate by the hour. Featured are both sites of the actual
airlines (where direct purchase seat prices seem to be slightly
higher for some reason) and those of consolidators that combine the
sites of yet more search engines/consolidators. Clearly a very
intricate and complicated electronic market place where buyers
may/may not be obtaining best values.
My journey
to the Far East will be from Toronto, with a long distance flight to
my starting point in Hanoi, Vietnam. Direct flights not possible
between these points, so I plan to break the journey for a couple of
days R & R in Singapore to recover from major jet-lag.
I have
observed that Tuesday to Thursday air travel seems to offer the best
deals— This makes sense, as business travellers are less likely to
be in the air during mid-week work time, resulting in more empty
seats on the market. Whether or not it is better to purchase tickets
early, ie: months before travel, or to wait till the last minute to
commit, is a judgement call that I have to make.
Buying an
air ticket in 2016 on-line does seem to be rather more transparent
than several years ago. The norm now seems to be that sites offer
quoted final prices which include all carrier taxes and fees.
Sometimes suppliers will unhelpfully offer fares in $US, so it pays
to be prudent to fully understand the types of (unequal) dollars
involved before pressing the 'commit' button. What seems to be less
clear, are the headline 'discounts' that ticket sellers appear to
offer....the $30 off grabber, for example, likely means ---a maximum
of $7.50 off per ticket, if 4 tickets are purchased together, as
explained in the mice type hidden at the bottom of page 6!
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