Priceline Airline Advice

[fkj2]

For those of you who have used Priceline for air fares, do you have any advice for those of us considering it? Does it make a difference what day of the week travel would occur or airport location? Thanks.

 

[savannah]

Hi, we got our 5 tickets from priceline a few weeks ago. We had orginally got a quote from a travel agency for 187 RT from Omaha to Orlando, but were dragging our feet trying to decide if we were going or not. I called back the travel a. and the tickets had jumped up to $330 per ticket. Panick attack!!! So I tried priceline. I put in for $195 per ticket, it came back as an 18% chance, "do you want to be higher?" I kept it at that, 2 minutes later, we had ticketS! I would say go low, Another advice, when it asks about alternate airports, go with what you want. I was tempted to put Kansas City down because I know that flights tend to be cheaper through there, and when we had used priceline for another time for a ticket, we put KC and my husband ended up having to drive to and from KC, which is about 180 additional miles. Obviously we prefered not to do this with our trip and so I kept Omaha only. (We would drive the 21/2 hours to save $500, but why if you can get it close?) We haven't left yet, but the other time we used the priceline, there was no problems associated with the tickets, ect. The only down fall is we are flying to Dallas first, which in my opinion is about an hour off the direct route, but oh well, we are saving $150 per ticket off the travel agency.

 

[WDWVirgin]

We used Priceline to book our air last Spring Break for DH, DS (5), DD (3) and me. I won't do it again because of the layovers. We didn't get that great of a deal (busy season), and the layovers were a pain with small children (3 hours in Detroit - fortunately the Badgers were playing in the NCAA tourney and we watched the entire game in the airport!) Also, we wanted to leave on Saturday and return on Friday. We ended up with flights arriving in Orlando at about 9:00 p.m. on Saturday and leaving at 6:30 a.m. on Friday. I think it all depends on the situation you are in, but you need to be really careful if you want X number of days in the parks and don't care about the day you arrive and depart. We also had major fiascos at boarding time (seat assignments not together - leaving Orlando they wanted us to have our 5 year old by himself a couple of rows ahead of us <IMG WIDTH="15" HEIGHT="15" SRC="/infopop/emoticons/icon_redface.gif" alt="red face"> ), however, these were airline dilemma's ccaused by overbooked flights, not Priceline problems). Just my opinion