Booking-sites,..

[cathay belgium]

Hi,

Simple questions:
*Tix.nl,Cheaptickets.nl, are these save to book with ??
The mostly give flights out and in on different carriers within the same alliance on good rates..
How about if you miss one flight on one carrier is the connection flight also guaranteed ?
* How does it come that you book already now at these sites on a carrier but you couldn't book these flights
on the site of the carrier itself ??
Thx for answers, anyone already some experience with these dutch sites..
Some belgian similar sites ?,

THX
CX-B

[regi]

We did some recent bookings on ebookers ( with Austrian )
Very strangely:
People who want to depart from Brussels better chose ebookers.de and not ebookers.be , and certainly not ebookers.fr
I don't know why, but at each site we got different prices for the same dates , leaving from Brussels to Vienna. ( booking directly with SN or Austrian costed about 3 times more )

Internal flights in Austria were cheaper booking through Austrian airlines than to book by ebookers or another booking site. Don't ask me an explanation. It is just my latest experience of 2 weeks ago.

But for long haul, I think that you could better prices by going to a travel agent. I prefer Joker. Sometimes they have short time promotions which are never listed on the websites, and don't appear in the booking engines. This is how I got Qantas tickets for 516 euro BRU-LHR-BKK in July !

[Air Key West]

I do some of my bookings via www.expedia.fr which strangely enough sometimes have slightly better fares than expedia.be (which was launched much later than expedia.fr). I have found expedia.fr to be very reliable (also when it comes to refunds). Just another option worth checking....

[b720]

try expedia.com prices in USD and often cheaper (excahnge rate is 1.40 to the euro right now)

[fretn]

I book through Expedia.com & Kayak.

[andorra-airport]

I think Kayak is one of the better ones, it compares a lot of different airlines. I seldom use Expedia. But I feel interested what you all use.

[Sikiri]

I myself use Kayak (and sometimes Edreams) to compare prices. When flying from Belgium, I always check Connections and Joker, since both of them have some amazing promotions. Same goes for KLM.be, from time to time KLM Belgium has some decent promotions. (I just booked Antwerp-JFK for €375, including a thalys ride from Antwerp Central to Schiphol).

[fets]

Start with matrix.itasoftware.com to find the lowest published fares and then try to match it on kayak/momondo, then take it to the right booking site.
For my trips over the last two years, I booked on Orbitz.com, US Airways (both US and EUR sites, different booking engines), Cheaptickets.com, Expedia.com, Expedia.de and Carlson-Wagonlit (cwt.be).
I also always do cross-checks on Joker and Connections, but since I generally have multi-stop itineraries, these sites don't work too well..

[andorra-airport]

Start with matrix.itasoftware.com to find the lowest published fares

Thank you! That was a website I was looking for. To see not only the price for 1 day, but for a whole month too.
Skyscanner.net has that as well. There you can even select "whole year" to see when the cheapest moment is to go.

[regi]

Start with matrix.itasoftware.com to find the lowest published fares

Thank you! That was a website I was looking for. To see not only the price for 1 day, but for a whole month too.
Skyscanner.net has that as well. There you can even select "whole year" to see when the cheapest moment is to go.

I suppose that the cheapiest moments are 25th december, 31st December or morning flights on the 1st January ?
But be aware: sometimes they cancel those flights on short notice because of low occupancy. Been posted here already some time ago.

[regi]

interesting to read that other members also had similar experiences of different prices on websites of the same companies but in another country.

[MAM]

The ticket price is the main thing most people looking at, but when there are problems with your ticket and you have to reach them: good luck!!

[regi]

The ticket price is the main thing most people looking at, but when there are problems with your ticket and you have to reach them: good luck!!

better than expected ! We booked a flight through ebookers.de Brussels-Vienna with Austrian. One passenger asked for wheel chair assistance. 1 Phonecall to Austrian airline and everything was fine. His wheelchair was standing ready for him at the check inn. And again at Vienna airport when he arrived and departed from there.
So Austrian Airlines didn't say "hey pall, you should have booked through us, not a booking site"
To be precise: we first phoned ebookers.de. The phone was answered almost immediately and the lady said that it was best we would contact Austrian directly and she gave the phone number - with the friendly addition: if you don't get through, phone me back and we arrange it.

But I understand your concern. To be honnest, we were not too confifent about this question beforehand. But now we entrust the service of a booking site.

[regi]

The ticket price is the main thing most people looking at, but when there are problems with your ticket and you have to reach them: good luck!!

On the other hand, I had once in the pre booking site time, a real old fashioned paper ticket through travel agent Nouvelles Frontières ( they are crap, no wonder they had to leave Bruges ). When I came at the check inn desk the lady said that I was erased from the system by...the office manager of Nouvelles Frontières Bruges. It was a Sunday morning, so no chance to arrange it. ( eventually it was arranged fine by myself )
Explanation: double booking, and he had erased every booking under my name instead of the obligatory debooking under booking number.
Some years ago, Nouvelles Frontières felt the pressure of the booking sites and started its own system. Good heavens ! A friend got into real trouble and I helped him out. When we looked for flights ,we got really cheap offers, mostly from CDG. So we choose a flight. We completed every form blablabla, untill the very last page where you confirm the payment and I suddenly saw at the right hand side a scroll bar appear. STOP! We scrolled down, guess what: the price had almost doubled. Returning the page resulted in blank pages.
We tried it several times again and again as a sport, with different random departure and arrival dates and airports all over the world. And each time again, the same joke. Just as if somewhere in a call centre in Mumbai a guy was changing the bookings at the last moment.
We started to print those random bookings and calculated the difference. Each time it was exactly the same percentage of increase. Cannot be a computer mistake.
We phoned the office in Gent and were told that we should come to a office of Nouvelles Frontières instead of using their own booking site
Nouvelles Frontières also had a kind of auction system every week for empty seats. I heard some really crazy stories of people showing up at Orly (I think) for a flight to Martinique, where they were told that those extremely cheap auction seats were stand by tickets. Flight full? No seat. bye bye. They could depart eventually but their entire holiday on Martinique they were afraid to be unable to return home on time again.
So yes, there is a difference in booking sites.

[andorra-airport]

Those are horror stories Regi. But me, and I guess a lot of other people book via Kayak, Expedia or other well known booking-sites. My latest cheapest offer was Air France, so apart from the fuel problems in Paris, I trust those guys, if things go wrong. Would be a different story if they offered me Biman, but I have never seen them on a booking site......... (but in the future I guess I will take the gamble with a 750 euro C-class ticket to Hong-Kong)

[regi]

Would be a different story if they offered me Biman, but I have never seen them on a booking site......... (but in the future I guess I will take the gamble with a 750 euro C-class ticket to Hong-Kong)

Right, Biman doesn't appear on booking sites. The tickets in Belgium were sold by De Vries, but they prefered to offer the Mahan Air tickets.
But behold: De Vries Reizen went bust yesterday !
http://www.devriesreizen.nl

Sad for them, they were great guys. Without them, many people would have not been able to travel cheaply. And De Vries supported several cultural happenings with free tickets in tombola's.

Biman: don't, just don't even think about it. The cost of staying afterwards 6 months in a mental institution and/or intensive care unit after a heart attack is much greater than the few pennies you saved by flying this airline. They succeeded to rip their "new" B777 apart in such a typical Biman way that it was on skytrax .
Please, we don't want to lose members, so, don't fly Biman. I did and I still have nightmares.
http://www.airlinequality.com/Forum/biman.htm
Just as late Frank Zappa sang: " the torture never stops" . The myth is that he wrote this song while staying 3 days in transit at Dhaka waiting for his connection to Bangkok.