Zen and the Art of Finding Cheap Airline Tickets

Did you notice the proliferation of the flight booking sites? I noticed it only recently. I was booking tickets for Germany and I used many sites to search for that perfectly priced ticket. And a lot of Zen resulted from this quest which I decided to share with you all.

Take a flight!

I noticed the proliferation of the sites via online ads that got displayed subsequently on the web pages I normally open. Suddenly all the ads were about flight booking sites and some of them I had never even come across before.

I had to check them out because the quest for the cheap flight tickets is not a simple one. Then I went ahead and tried some of them and did not come back impressed. A lot of them were showing crazy routes and long hours for places I wanted to go and the low prices existed only in the advertisements. They completely vanished once I tried the site! This is true for some of the more established sites as well.

And as for new learning after this latest quest for air tickets, there are a few. First is related to the credit card. As I was booking the ticket for a family member I realized that some airlines insist that the card user should be part of the traveling group. As this was not true in my case, I had to give up the cheapest air fare I got. 

The second learning is that the travel portals have become very savvy. Once you book a ticket they keep calling you to purchase additional services like travel insurance, hotel bookings and taxi arrangements etc. from them. In my case they have done it well, they called only a few times and with relevant products but I wonder if this would become another area where marketing calls are going to become a norm?

As for the Zen, the quest continues.