So you want / need to travel somewhere? Before visiting your favorite site for booking airfare and hotels, make sure to know what you’re getting into. That’s where we kick in with what I like to believe is another piece of great content to help you save money. This time round we’re “tackling” travel websites, presenting you with five money-saving tips to try. Check ’em out and do let us know how they work for you…
1. Delete Your Cookies / Change Your IP Address
This is the number one thing you could try to get the better rate.
What you want to accomplish with this is to always show as a new client. Travel websites are notorious for digging through their stats and using that data in real-time to serve the results that make more sense for them, but not for you.
For instance, if you’ve been looking to book a cross-country flight a week before, you may get a higher rate on your next visit. The travel website knows you are interested in that trip and could thus be willing to pay more for the service.
They know that with the help of cookies and your IP address. You can delete your cookies or use the “Incognito” feature of your browser to visit the site without any cookies. Your IP address, on the other hand, may not be changed that often. That can be “solved” by buying a ticket from a local coffee shop or by connecting to a Virtual Private Network (VPN) which will assign a different IP address to your computer. This way, the travel site will see you as a brand new user.
2. Mac Users Beware
A few years ago, Orbitz analyzed the data from its site visits and bookings only to find out that Mac users spend as much as 30 percent more per night on hotels than their PC counterparts. Also, they are 40 percent more likely to book a four or five-star hotel than PC users.
So Orbitz decided to act upon these findings and has started serving different search results for those accessing from a Mac. In other words, if you’re searching for a hotel from an Apple-made computer, you will first see the more expensive hotels. And in order to see the full list that also includes more affordable options, you should sort the results by price.
Don’t worry though, rates are the same for both PC and Mac users — it is just the way the search results are shown that is different.
3. Don’t Rely on Your Frequent Flyer ID Too Much
When you’re searching for airfare, airline websites may ask for your frequent flyer ID. There is nothing wrong with adding it there, but for some reason you may get a more expensive ticket in return.
You see, even within the same class (economy or business) there are differences, and when you’re a registered with the company, they may search for better seats for you, thus showing you pricier options. This does NOT have to be the case, but we’ve seen that happening.
What you want to do is open two different browsers (say Chrome and Internet Explorer / Edge) and perform the same search, one with your frequent flyer ID and the other without it. If there is a price different, go for the lower cost option. Or if the price is the same — feel free to grab those miles.
4. Traveling in Groups Could Cost More
And one would think that getting 5 tickets should come with a discount? Think again.
As we’ve noted in the previous section, there are price differences within the same seat classes. If you are looking for 5 tickets, the system will check 5 available seats within the same price class. So even if there is only 1 seat available with the lowest price, you won’t get it — rather, you will get the higher price options for all 5 seats. The system can’t suggest you 1 ticket with lower price and 4 that are more costly.
If you are travelling in a relatively small group, perhaps it is better to book tickets separately or at least two at the time to get a better deal. The downside of doing that is that the system (and the airline) won’t know that you are a part of the same group, and won’t suggest you to seat next to each other. You can still pay extra to pick the seat you want, though but that will increase the price of the ticket.
In any case, you may want to perform multiple searches from different computer to find out how much a single seat costs, how much two seats cost and what’s the price for the entire group. This way you’ll know whether you can save and how much.
5. Shop Around
In order to save money on travel, you will have to roll up your sleeves and visit as many sites as you can to get the best possible deal.
In addition to online travel agencies like Expedia and Orbitz, we also suggest trying out travel search engines such as Vayama, HipMunk, Kayak, SkyScanner and Trivago (for hotels only). These sites aggregate prices from a number of different companies, including travel agencies, airlines, hotel chains and car rental companies to show you everything that’s out there. Also some of them let you set alerts to get an email when an amazing offer is available. Make sure to use that option to save some cash on your next travel.
Good luck getting that deal! 😉