Finding Cheap Airfares, Discounted Airline Tickets, and Bargain Travel Deals

With airfare specials coming and going so quickly, and such differences from city to city, there are fare trackers that I often use to help find some of the deals each week. Now often I do receive press releases that will alert me to the latest airfare specials which I post in the Air Travel Forum, but for the best deals out of your home airport, I have compiled some websites that might help you find a good price for where you want to travel.

Checking out airfare specials released by the airlines

• Check out the Air Travel Forum for press releases on airfare specials, sweepstakes, and air travel discussions.

Tracking down sales and cheap airfares
Airfare trackers have leaped onto the online scene. You just list your airport of choice and it can help find your airfare.

• FareCompare - FareCompare updates its fares constantly. You can also search for the best First Class airfares as well. How is it different from other sites? From their FAQ, I found this explanation, "FareCompare gets the raw fare data from the airlines directly and we process it several hours before it is available on the online travel agencies and many times the airline sites themselves. We are not a meta-search engine which "scrapes" the data from other sites using HTML scraping or API's. Our system contains over 30 million airfares and we process millions of fare changes throughout the day."
• Yapta - Yapta tracks airfare price drops and also advises on getting a refund on the difference of your ticket if prices drop. Note too, that airfare price drops don't always = refund as there has to be availability for your travel dates to have a chance at securing a refund of the price difference.
• Kayak - Buzz - Kayak's Buzz option means you can check airfares from your home airport to anywhere in the world, which can be really helpful if you want to get away, don't know where you want to go, but want to find a good airfare.
• Sidestep - Sidestep has a very user friendly setup for finding one way or roundtrip airfares.
• Farecast - Farecast has a series of arrows that accord with speculating whether an airfare will rise or fall and whether you should book, or wait to buy. There are risks inherent in this, but it is fun to see airfares treated a bit as if they are on the stock exchange. There are interesting tools too, including a fare comparison over a 30 day period.
• Airfare Watchdog - This site has really come into its own, using real people to find hidden airfare gems.
• Cheapflights - The real strength of Cheapflights is that it has individual sites for a huge host of different countries. It lists deals, and gives you an idea of what kind of good airfares are out there. They are also pretty good at alerting you to airfare specials.