Have you tried Orbitz?

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I have, probably a dozen or so times, but I can't say they don't blow any more because I've never had a big ordeal with them. In any case, the whole point is they're never cheaper than getting it right from the airlines (since they add a mark-up fee), and they're generally useless travel agents, so it's better to just buy from the airline.

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Plase don't use orbitz, they're just as bad: I hate orbitz.

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I like Yahoo! Travel. It's not Bill Gates.

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Thanks!

Should also give a look at Yahoo! FareChase, it searches (many) supplier sites for you, and lets you book directly with them.

(I work for Y! Travel)

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Nor is Expedia, MS sold up their share years ago.

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Ya missed the first round of beer.

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I've heard that's the case with most of those online cheap ticket sites; if there are any snags you're screwed, and it's next to impossible to get your money back. Also, swa rocks, and you can usually get the best price by going directly through the airline.

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Last time I tried to book a bunch of hotels for a trip, I ended up calling each hotel and book directly because all internet travel sites were more expensive. At best some of them (I don't remember which ones - might be Orbitz) offered the same price I got directly from the hotels.

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I always use those aggregators (orbitz, expedia, travelocity) to find out what airline has the best time, then go directly to the airlines website and buy via that way... I know its cheeze dick to the aggregators to use then bypass them, but eh..

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I do the same, but will not use orbitz, expedia, etc. Brad is forgetting, but he also had a problem with orbitz once. He had a credit that he was never able to use, so Orbitz gained.

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I have found through my experience to use Expedia and Orbitz to find what airlines go where and have good deals (on hotels too), then go to that companies website. 9 times out of 10 the company will offer the best deal (when accounting for the extra charges Expedia adds in). Especially Alaskaair.com and Southwest.com normally are always better than expedia!

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United lost my business last September when I was trying to book an unaccompanied flight for my 7 year old and the agent told me that no parent in their right mind would let a kid fly alone and told me that I should move closer to him so I could be better mother.

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Yeah, Expedia sucks.

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Expedia just did me a favor today and cancelled a ticket for me at no cost :)

Me, Monty, and David just got here. We are staying at the Inn. Give me a call on my cell to do dinner.

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Email me your latest number, will ya? I seem to recall calling you recently and getting an operator.

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whitaker, xb95, jproulx and I are are here in the Portland Ballroom, we'd totally be up for dinner too after if you want.

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We got too hungry and split before the end :)

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I booked through STA Travel while I was in the US. There's probably cheaper places though. :/

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Why were you dealing with United? Our tickets were on Alaska.

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My return leg (and probably Brad's) is United.

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Tickets through Expedia, Alaksa flight, operated by Horizon, but United was the "validating carrier".

I mean, duh, c'mon David.

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Yeah, that makes perfect sense!

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www.farechase.com is great because they'll link you up to individual airlines without the middleman, and you still get a great rate.

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Take a look at www.expertflyer.com. They won't book tickets for you, but they _will_ give you detailed access to flight availability and low-level information about what fare classes are available on each flight. This is very, very useful if you want to know whether or not there are any first class seats that you can upgrade to from coach, whether or not you can use the frequent flyer miles to get a coach/first class ticket, whether you can use an AA VIP coupon to upgrade an international coach class ticket to business class, etc. www.expertflyer.com is also way faster than most airline's web sites. So I use it to figure out what flights or what airline I want to use, and then go directly to the airline's webpages to book the ticket.

Basically, if anyone is old enough to remember compuserve's EAASY Saber service, which allows you to get direct access to essentially the same system travel agents get to use (complete with the same easy-to-use UI which the travel agents get to use: "/r,bos,sfo,aug12,1700,AA" to list all American Airlines flights from boston to san francisco around 5pm on August 12), www.expertflyer.com gives you all of the same low-level information. Unfortunately it's a clicky-GUI-web (feh!) interface instead of the much faster command-line interface that I prefer using, but it gives you access to the same information.

The only downside is that you have to pay for access to www.expertflyer.com, but the time it's saved me in order to find the cheaper fares has definitely been worth it, at least for me.

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I had a hotel booking through Expedia when I went to a place in Pennsylvania in June. The hotel told me, yes, they had the booking, but Expedia hadn't set aside a room with that booking. (Could have just been the hotel, but all of the other hotels were fine, and not booked through Expedia.)

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Same thing happened to me on Memorial Day weekend. Booked 2 tickets to Cali on Orbitz, lost one ticket. Offered to pay lost ticket fee, but AW said that the flights were too booked. Gave our seats away to standby passengers even though we had tickets reserved (we just didn't have one of them). Told us too bad so sad about us not being able to take ANY flights to Cali (everything was overbooked). We ended up not even being able to go on our trip. They did manage to lose my bag for 2 weeks though, because it was taken by check-in and then flown to Cali and who-knows-where-else without me. Fun time.

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