hotwire for air tickets?

[Nancy for Disney]

Considering flying with DD10 over spring break (not to disney). I finally found some reasonably priced air tickets on hotwire. I can't get over how expensive flying is now. It seems like yesterday I could go from Kansas City to Las Vegas for about $150 round trip now it is about $400. I have family in Las Vegas. Anyway-is there anything I should watch for regarding hotwire. I have always flown Southwest. They are always affordable and are good if you have to change your flights or you have an unexpected change of plans. The flight I am looking at is on Frontier Airlines. We can probably get away with just carry on for the flight so I am not going to worry about the baggage fee.

Please give opinions on Hotwire. Thanks.

 

[goofy4tink]

You're flying at a very expensive time...spring break. It's hard to get a decent fare for that time frame. I really don't know anything about booking with hotwire. I am a strong advocate for booking directly with the airline. IF there were to be any issue with the flight, it would be very hard to rectify it through hotwire. At least that is what I've heard from many people.
I'm sure someone here will have some imput.

 

[bumbershoot]

I've used orbitz and travelocity for airfare. Both times the prices were the same, but I could get a little bit back for clicking through a rewards site, so that's what I did. Both times I knew the trip was happening, and I was fully aware of all cancel policies.

BUT the first thing you need to do is make sure that that price you're seeing can actually be booked! For whatever reason, those booking sites can sometimes get "stuck" with an old price, and you find that out as you're going through the booking process.

I've never seen a bookable price on those sites that can't be booked directly with the airline itself. So if I had to make a bet here, I'd bet that the price is just "stuck", and you won't be able to book that price at all.



And FWIW, the prices now are so much less than they could be. I'm 41, and in 8th grade I did a roundtrip from San Francisco to DC. It was over $800. If prices had continued going up with inflation, you can just imagine what prices would be like now... So the reality is that the prices are lower than they could be and we're actually all very LUCKY for such relatively low prices...whether or not our wallets know it.