I’m looking to get a couple airline tickets and hotel for a few nights in New York. There are tons of priceline.com, and travelocity’s on teh web, and was wondering if any of you have used any of the sites/ and or what method you recommend for purchasing airline tickets. Thanks.
southwest.com has the best deals, by far.
I use travelocity and expedia. Search around all the sites, but they all use the SABRE system, so they should all have the same flights and prices.
Consult “The Stella”.
Priceline and Hotwire are good if you have all day free for travelling on your desired dates. To determine your Price for Priceline, I always check Orbitz, Sidestep and/or Travelocity, and then undercut the best price I can get on those sites by $100 or so. What a lot of people don’t realize is that Priceline will come back with the best deal it can find and give you the option to buy that ticket if your named price is too low.
Southwest can be good, depending on the market, but I often find I can get a better deal to my destinations on Continental. For instance, I purchased my tickets from Boston to SD for $300 on Hotwire, and it turned out they were on Continental. The same trip on Southwest, from Providence, RI (Southwest doesn’t fly to Boston), to San Diego was $400 plus tax.
I always wondered why people wanted to fly with the people who charged the least. Wouldn’t you want their mechanics and pilots to be well-paid? 
One stop shopping:
Jared - southwest is the only airline to make money the past 2 years, I believe. This shows they have a reputable record and people come back to them. I’ve flown them a few times, and they have excellent service every single time. I’ve flown American, Continental, Delta, Air Japan, Northwest and some others. Delta was by far the worst, followed by Northwest. American and Continental were pretty good.
I flew Vanguard one time, and got royally fucked. I think they are completely out of business, but I’m not sure.
yea, looks like I’ll be flying on Sept 11 to NYC, wonder if the prices will be even cheaper that day.
Can’t vouch for the airline end of it, but have gotten some excellent deals on Priceline this year as far as the hotels. Stayed in San Antonio at the Hyatt Riverwalk, very nice 4-star place for $60.00 a night, Travelocity wanted $120.00. Friend stayed in SA at the Westin, also a 4-star for $50.00 a night. Only drawback to Pricleine is you can’t pick the exact property you stay at, but you pick the neighborhood and star level. Generally a 4-star in an area you know is gonnma be a nice place.
JWright - what was so bad about Delta? My uncle is a pilot for them, and it would really rile him up to hear bad stuff about them. To give you a hint about his personality, he has a cleaning cabinet that’s about 6’ by 2’ and 1’ deep full of cleaning supplies for his 911. So ruffling feathers is funny.
Well, I live in Cincinnati, and it is Delta’s 2nd largest hub, many of it being Comair. Their prices are ludicrously enormous. Example: I wanted to fly to Myrtle Beach for vacation. Cinci to Myr was around $450. Dayton (1 hour N of cincy) to cincy to Myr was around $200. WTF!! Columbus, which is about 2 hours N of cincy, is the same way. It really pisses me off. Also, the service just generally hasn’t been that great from them. They are virtually always late, and if you have close connecting flights, you can miss them.
They also don’t pay their pilots enough. There was a HUGE Comair strike in Cincy about 2-3 years ago. It went on for about 6 months to a year. The starting pilot made about $30,000 from them, and that’s after all the training and everything. Ridiculous.