We all want to get the best deal on a flight, the problem of course is that Airline mistake fares, error flight tickets, Airline error Fares, secret fares, etc, etc are hard to find, and don’t typically last a long time. Below are a few suggestions to help you locate and make use of these special flight discount deals provided by the airlines.
1. Since these discounted fares are somewhat rare and typically don’t last very long, the easiest way to find out about them is to have someone inform you about them as quickly as possible either through email, Facebook, or twitter, or to go to one of the websites below which give you a heads up when one is located. In either case, whether you want to look for the deals yourself on an error fare site, or you want the websites to inform of deals as they become available, you’ll need to know which websites work as flight glitch finders or list blowout airfares as they become available. So here are a number of the top websites for finding flight mistake fares:
A. www.secretflying.com
B. www.theflightdeal.com/
C. www.fly4free.com/
D. www.airfarewatchdog.com/top-50-fares/
E. www.yyzdeals.com/ (other Canadian Cities in drop down menu)
F. www.flyertalk.com/forum/mileage-run-deals-372
2. Since the flight pricing errors don’t typically last very long and may require flying within a few weeks time, it’s a good idea to know where you stand with your employer in regards to vacation time. While booking with a US Airline for flights out of the United States will typically give you 24 hours to cancel your flight without penalty. Those of us outside of the United States won’t have that luxury, so we’ll want to know prior to any serious searching whether or not booking a flight for a specific time will cause any scheduling problems at the workplace.
3. Just because an error fare doesn’t include your home city as an option, doesn’t mean your home airport isn’t included in the special fare. Remember that these fares are the result of individuals searching for flights for themselves, who know the typical prices they expect to be returned, and as such, when they find a fare for their flight that is considerably cheaper than normal they list it on one of the sites above. So unless the person who finds the discounted price happens to be flying out of the same city as you, there is no way of knowing whether your city is included in the special fare price without checking. In the above sites that are forum based, other posters may have already checked to see what other cities are included in the deal, saving you some time.
In my case, while doing some research for this blog post, I noticed an airline error flight from New York to Thailand, returning to Montreal or Toronto which caught my attention. No mention of Winnipeg at all. Winnipeg however is my home airport, so I plugged in the dates and airport codes, while only changing the final destination code from Montreal (YUL) to Winnipeg (YWG), and lo and behold, I was greeted with the same basic price of just over $600. Fortunately for me, this was one of the fares that had plenty of date options for months in advance, so I ended up booking for December of this year. Even with a one way flight to NYC tacked onto the price, the tickets overall price came to around $840, well under the typical pricing for a Winnipeg to Thailand flights of $1200 to $1800.