They can be cheaper, but I’ve had issues with my seat assignments not getting to the airline and then the day of the flight I learn I’m stuck in a middle seat. So unless it’s a radical difference in price I just book directly with the airline.
Where they can be helpful is when you either prefer to or you absolutely must switch airlines.
Like when I went to Africa I flew Delta from home to Atlanta and Atlanta to Johannesburg. But then I switched to South African Airways from Johannesburg to my final destination. And SAA is not even part of the Delta SkyMiles whatever their global consortium is called. It’s part of American’s. So I wouldn’t have been able to book all the way through on either Delta’s or American’s website. (Well, maybe on American’s, but their options to get to Jo’berg were not stellar, whereas Delta had good options through both Atlanta on Delta and through Amsterdam on their partner KLM.)
That is pretty sad. My son is taking Amtrak from Chicago to Washington, DC next week but would be going through either Cincinnati or Cleveland.
Just a plug here for Amtrak. It is a bit of a whipping boy sometimes but I have found it to be a great service, especially compared to the train service here in Canada. It is comfortable, well-priced with an extensive network, notwithstanding the notable omission of Columbus. The long haul routes are a great way to see the country and meet folks if you have the time.
don’t airlines now have one way tickets rather than having to do round trip? it used to be that you could only do round trip and one way was not the price of the one leg but i thought they changed that.
i haven’t done any complicated flights anyway. i fly to the same state a lot and the only two airlines i fly are delta or southwest, so i tend to do the entire trip with just one of them. american is dead to me. fuck american. FUCK THEM
With southwest, there is no choice other than to book on their website.
You can totally buy one-way tickets. Pricing is all done by the algorithms, presumably they charge whatever they can get away with to maximize revenue.
Southwest is now working with some third parties, mostly for business travel as I understand it. Egencia lets you book SW flights, for example.
Yeah, they started building it in the mid-1920s and then the Great Depression hit and they ran out of money. The tunnels are all dug, just sitting there. I don’t know that they ever got as far as laying track though, and there was certainly never a functioning subway. But in a few places around town you can see the entrances. They’re not marked or anything but they’re there.
There’s been proposals over the years to finally finish it, but they never seem to get very far.
The thing is that people will not adopt public transportation until there’s a serious traffic problem and Cincinnati doesn’t have a serious traffic problem. Sure, it takes longer to get places at rush hour, but it’s nothing compared to NYC or Chicago or Atlanta or Seattle… places with real actual traffic problems.
i thought i had in the past mixed airlines and booked through the 2 websites and it was cheaper than just doing both on a 3rd party website, but not positive about that.
I used to do a 15 hour drive to college regularly for multiple reasons: flights were expensive, required a connection, and was a little over an hour to the closest airport. The big airports with cheap nonstop flights were 5-6 hours away
Sure you can, but whether you’re looking for one-way or round trip there’s still no great way to get from a random US city to a podunk city in sub-Saharan Africa all on one airline or even one airline’s network.
Yeah when hubs & I went to the Bahamas we got first class one way tickets down there on Delta and first class one way tickets home on American… for cheaper than round-trip coach tickets would have been on either airline.
Cost us five minutes at check-in as we had to give the Delta people all of our return flight information, but no biggie. Apparently that’s where each airline had excess unsold seats so we were happy to do it that way.
I’ve heard cheapoair is supposed to be better, but I’ve hardly flown recently and I have status on Delta (they keep giving me my pre-pandemic status) so I tend to start there.
I only found the Bahamas tix because Delta was so absurd on the return flights that I started shopping around and American was absurd on the flights down and it occurred to me to check the one-way fares on each airline.
yeah, on the website directly, you know you’re not in basic economy because they split the price in columns for each class. not sure how it works with those 3rd parties and you might get stuck in the wrong class.
i never fly basic economy because i want to pick my seat.