First off, Southwest Rapid Rewards are transferable which means that if you are traveling to a city that is serviced by their airline, you should never pay more for a roundtrip ticket than the current ebay price for a rapid rewards voucher (which is generally about $300). Even though RR vouchers come imprinted with your name, according to their Terms of Service they are fully-transferable. I have actually been in the situation where I had booked a flight and was relying upon receiving an RR voucher from SWA in the mail which never came. The morning of my flight, the mailbox was still empty but I was able to run downtown to a ticket broker and snag an RR credit for $270 and then sell back my voucher when it arrived later the next week for $230 (flying essentially for $40 which was not bad considering the alternative at that point which was to purchase a same-day ticket at the counter from Phx to Dallas for $600+).
So next time you are facing absurd airfare…
- check and see if SW flies to your intended destination
- make sure your travel days do not fall on any of the blackout dates
- and run a search on ebay and yahoo auctions for “rapid rewards.”
If you’ve got time to play with, a better strategy is to setup a persistent ebay search using FreeBiddingTools.com and then use your favorite RSS reader to monitor the results over a few days. Don’t forget local ticket brokers will have these too so if you are in a time crunch like I was, that’s an option. Lastly, below is a quick compilation of the various travel services I use to check for plane tix. A neat trick if you use Firefox as your browser is to put them all in a bookmark folder called “Travel” and then right-click on that folder from within FF and choose “Open in Tabs.” This allows you to quickly pull up all travel sites and run your flight search against each to find price discrepancies.
- Yahoo Travel (Travelocity)
- Expedia
- Orbitz
- Cheap Tickets
- Kayak
- Sidestep
- Travel Grove
- Mobissimo
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Hey Sean– I believe we met informally at CFUNITED?
Anyhow, instead of using those sites individually, check out some of the travel site aggregators:
http://www.sidestep.com/air/
http://www.travelgrove.com/
http://www.kayak.com/s/index.jsp
http://www.mobissimo.com/search_airfare.php
Brandon,
I think we did meet at CFUNITED- how goes it?
Those ones I listed are all aggregators and kyak’s already on there (love their interface). I’ve added those other three you suggested to the list though!
Nice blog btw, i’ve got it subbed now ;-)
sean
After posting my comment I saw the Kayak link at the bottom, my bad. :) I think the thing that differentates the sites I posted vs places like Orbitz is that it actually searches the individual airlines sites and so forth (where some have their best fares like Southwest for instance). We’re finally getting Southwest service back here in Denver again and they have some great deals…
I think I’ve came across your blog a couple of times from fullasagoog but just now made the connection. :)
After posting my comment I saw the Kayak link at the bottom, my bad. :) I think the thing that differentates the sites I posted vs places like Orbitz is that it actually searches the individual airlines sites and so forth (where some have their best fares like Southwest for instance). We're finally getting Southwest service back here in Denver again and they have some great deals…
I think I've came across your blog a couple of times from fullasagoog but just now made the connection. :)