First time booking flights and car rental.....

[Piglet]

This will be our first time booking flights and doing a car rental. We have always driven to WDW. We have flown before but one was a Make A Wish trip and the other was a trip that was won. Do you have any tips for getting good deals for flights and car rentals?? Our trip isn't until January, from looking around, most can not be booked yet. How far in advance can I book or is it best to wait until a certain number of days before?

TIA!!!

 

[sam_gordon]

This will be our first time booking flights and doing a car rental. We have always driven to WDW. We have flown before but one was a Make A Wish trip and the other was a trip that was won. Do you have any tips for getting good deals for flights and car rentals?? Our trip isn't until January, from looking around, most can not be booked yet. How far in advance can I book or is it best to wait until a certain number of days before?

TIA!!!

There are no hard and fast rules for getting "good deals" on airfare. Some folks will say 6 months from your trip, others 54 days, others 4 months.

You should be able to book January flights now on any "legacy" (Delta, United, US Air, etc) airline. Heck, JetBlue is even taking bookings through February 11.

The best thing you can do is start researching and taking notes on what prices/times you're seeing. You can set up an alert on 'Bing', that's supposed to tell you whether it's a good time to book or not, but I don't know how accurate that is.

Personally, I'll use ITA Matrix http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ but I don't have JetBlue or SW serving my local airport.

As far as car deals, the major carriers will allow you to book and cancel with no penalty (double check your reservation), so IMO, go ahead and book a car now that you can cancel and keep checking to see if the rates change. You can look at mousesavers (http://www.mousesavers.com/transportation-for-disney-vacations/rental-car-discounts/) among other websites for rental car codes.

 

[SandyinMonterey]

I will share my last mess up with airfare. We went to WDW in April and I started looking at airfare very early on (as I always do). When prices first came out, it was in the high $300's to mid $400's. I knew that was good right off but I thought for sure it would come down because I was looking so early and it always has before. It didn't. And not only that, as one point all flight times and connections changed. Ended up going with another airline with better times and paying more. My rule of thumb now, if I see a price that I'm comfortable with, I get it and stop looking afterwards. We rented with Enterprise for our last trip and was very pleased. Signed up for the Emerald Isle and skipped the counter. I think it would be a good idea to sign up for a loyalty program. Used discount codes found on these boards and got a great rate. Never do the pay up front option because you usually can't cancel if a better price comes along.

 

[sam_gordon]

I will share my last mess up with airfare. We went to WDW in April and I started looking at airfare very early on (as I always do). When prices first came out, it was in the high $300's to mid $400's. I knew that was good right off but I thought for sure it would come down because I was looking so early and it always has before. It didn't. And not only that, as one point all flight times and connections changed. Ended up going with another airline with better times and paying more. My rule of thumb now, if I see a price that I'm comfortable with, I get it and stop looking afterwards. We rented with Enterprise for our last trip and was very pleased. Signed up for the Emerald Isle and skipped the counter. I think it would be a good idea to sign up for a loyalty program. Used discount codes found on these boards and got a great rate. Never do the pay up front option because you usually can't cancel if a better price comes along.

The bolded is the best thing you can learn.