There was a time when travel agents were king. You had to beg them to get you the lowest airfare. Still there was no guarantee that you would get the lowest-priced air ticket. It all depended on your luck, the booking skills of the agent and the interest taken by him in your case.
Today, it is a completely different story. There are hundreds of websites on the net that sell tickets at amazingly low fares; some of them at rates that are less than the discounted airline rates. All these sites work 24/7, so you can log on at any point of the day or night and get your ticket.
The challenge is finding the site that gives the lowest fare. Each site claims that its fares are the lowest. However, comparisons will show that they are more or less alike. So, what do you do?
You should first visit the travel search engines like SideStep.com, Kayak.com or Mobissimo.com. These sites scour all travel-related sites to check which site is offering the lowest airfare. What’s more, they also make a booking for you. So, you have the advantage of finding out the lowest fare by going to one site only.
However, the catch here is that some travel sites have barred search engines from going through their database. The results that you see therefore do not include the fares that these sites are offering. So, you need to visit large travel sites like Expedia, Travelocity, Lowestfare.com, and obtain their fares too before making a decision..Another way of getting the lowest available fare is to register on those sites that inform you of price drops. These sites send an e-mail whenever they learn that an airline is willing to take a passenger at a fare that is less than the going rate. However, in such cases you can’t choose your flight.
