With the end of the year is a mere ten weeks away, I’m sure that many potential travelers are looking for airfares to either reach or maintain elite status with an airline or to just get a decent fare for the holidays. Finding a good airfare isn’t as easy as simply going to a travel booking site and sorting by price. That might work sometimes, but if you are flexible with your travel dates and times, as are most people doing mileage runs or booking leisure travel, you can really score a good fare with a bit of work.
What is the Lowest Published Fare?
Update: At the moment, the Fare Compare mileage run tool is not available. I’m leaving the instructions in case the tool returns, but until it does, the site is completely useless and full of SEO tricks to generate page views. Gross!
Throughout the day, I go to the FlyerTalk Fares at to find the lowest published fares for my region.You have to do this frequently because the best airfares are sometimes available for only a few hours, and airline sales have been notoriously bad deals. Also, don’t get lost looking at the rest of this site. The FlyerTalk Fares and the Custom Fare Alerts are the only useful parts of this site. The rest of the site stinks of link baiting and SEO gaming.
To find my fares, I use both “NYC” and “EWR” since those fares are listed separately. I rarely fly to international destinations so I stick with North America as my zone. The default list sorting is by Price Per Mile, but I change that to Sort by Total Fare. Then I look for places to go. If I want a mileage run, then I look for fares with low PPM, but if I want to go a specific place, then I look for fares. If I don’t like the prices, then I stop looking and go back to my life.
If I do like it, I then note the fare bucket (the first letter of the fare class) and the airline. Then I look for the fare rules.
What are the Fare Rules?
There are a number of sites that can help you find fare rules. The two sites I’ve used with great success are ExpertFlyer, which is a premium site with very powerful tools, and Wandering Aramean’s Travel Planning Tools. In either case, you want to pore over the fare rules. You should pay attention to:
is the fare one-way or round-trip?
if it’s a round-trip fare, what is the minimum or maximum stay?
what is the advance purchase requirement?
is the fare valid only on certain days of the week?
when does the fare expire?
are there blackout dates?
does the fare require nonstop travel or are transfers allowed?
If you feel you can live with the restrictions, which the cheapest fares almost always have, then look for flights that meet these requirements.
What Flights Can I Take?
One of the most valuable tools for frequent fliers is ITA Software’s Matrix. The company was recently acquired by Google, and we’re all hoping that they do not get rid of the Matrix because their new Google Flights is almost useless.
You have to use the advanced options to find flights that meet the conditions of the fare.
Note that the “Departing from” and “Destination” fields are pretty straightforward, but the codes below each city/airport need explanation. I used “UA+” to one or more flights on United, but you should use the two-digit code for your airline. The “/F” means to search for flights that meet the following fare conditions. The “BC=G” tells the Matrix to search for flights that are listed with the booking code “G”, but you should use the code that you found with Fare Compare.
Change the dates to what works for you, and begin your search.
It’s possible that the Matrix doesn’t find flights that meet your criteria. If that’s the case, then you should change your dates and search again. It’s also possible that despite the fact that there’s a fare published for your origin and destination (“city pairs”, as they’re called) but flights do not have any seats available in that fare bucket. This is how airlines manage their pricing: they published specific fares, the impose restrictions on those fares, they make available in or withhold seats from certain fare buckets.
Once you find flights that work for you, go to that airline’s site and buy the tickets there. There are lots of advantages to doing that, not the least of which is that the airlines can control the reservation should something go wrong. It’s probably not something you’ll need, but it’ll make things easier should your plans go awry.
Works for Me
I discovered this method about a year ago, while scouring the FlyerTalk message boards and finding a ton of valuable information that travelers have posted on online fora, countless blogs, and a couple of wikis. The “commons” have been a valuable resource for strategies on finding good airfares. Using this method, I was able to book some very inexpensive flights to the Pacific Northwest, including a pure mileage run to Seattle. There’s nothing more satisfying than learning to do something yourself and seeing it actually work.
But if you prefer to skip the research for learning the system, Nicholas Kralev wrote a nice concise explanation to Decoding Air Travel. I probably knew 80% of what was already written here, but had I read this a year ago, I would have saved a lot of time and spared my eyesight some. But I’m a scholar so I am not supposed to fear doing research.
Update: If you’re ready to delve further into The Matrix and use the advanced codes, check out Google’s support page and this explainer on how to use those codes.
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Perhaps it is a bad sign that Sarah and I didn’t get to ride our bikes to Montauk this year, but we are taking our first mileage run this weekend. We will be going to Seattle, by way of Los Angeles, leaving at 7:00 AM on Saturday morning and landing at JFK just 24 hours later.
I upgraded our seats to business class on the westbound JFK-LAX segment so we will have a very comfortable place to sleep and a little breakfast once airborne. Unfortunately, we won’t have the sundae bar, which is one of my favorite parts of flying United’s JFK-LAX/SFO business class service, but we will have an almost lie-flat bed. We have a long layover in Los Angeles on the outbound portion and will be having breakfast with my dad at Pann’s Restaurant near LAX. On the turnaround in Seattle, which begins about three hours after we land in Seattle, we will be having dinner with Sarah’s friend Grace at Thirteen Coins, what Sarah calls an old man restaurant near the Seattle Airport.
The inbound portion of the run will be pretty streamlined with no long connections so there won’t be much time for any more visiting. At best, we will have time to hang out at the club, get a nightcap, board our flight, and get some sleep after a long day and almost 6,900 butt-in-seat miles.
Sarah and I flew to Memphis a week ago to catch Gonerfest 8, a four-day music festival that I’ve wanted to see but never could because either I was too busy during the semester or there were softball playoffs to play. However, this year I let my teammates take care of business in the playoffs (they won in the semi-finals!) and go see some rock music for a change.
The experience was familiar, although I haven’t been to any live show of these bands for many years. There was a lot of people I swear I have seen in the past, maybe even from New York, there was loads of cheap beer, and everyone was dressed in what you would expect at an event like this. There were some surprises, however. There were people, both fans and bands, from as far as Australia. There were a TON of people snapping photos with pretty good SLR cameras, although I didn’t feel like brining in my camera to a night club.
As for the music, I have to admit to have been unfamiliar with most of the specific bands, but I was most impressed by the Straight Arrows, the Gories, the Mean Jeans, Midnight Snaxx, the Outdoorsmen, the Shirks!, the True Sounds of Thunder, Human Eye, the Alarm Clocks, the recently reunited Brides, and Black Sunday. Both bands at the free Sunday Afternoon show, Two Tears and the Jam Messengers, were worthy of playing a full show at any of the other revenue shows.
The city of Memphis seemed to be caught unaware about the scope of this festival, even if remains rather small. No one at our hotel or at the car rental counter knew about it. The cab driver—curiously, we had the same one for the shows on Friday and on Saturday nights—was puzzled about the high number of calls coming for the Hi-Tone, where all of the night shows took place. However, my friend Ives assured me that all the BBQ places ordered extra pork for the occasion.
The constant flow of shows, and the attendant recovery periods, made it hard to see much of Memphis. Sarah and I did get to trek out to Mud Island River Park to see the scale model of the Mississippi River, from the Kentucky Dam to the Gulf of Mexico. You see the bridges that span, the towns that surround, and wade in to the water of Ol’ Man River. It was certainly worth a trip on the monorail to reach Mud Island River Park.
We toured the downtown area on Sunday afternoon, including a detour into the Peabody Hotel to see the famous ducks in the lobby. The most striking building we saw downtown was the abandoned Sterick Building, which caught my eye when I was driving through the downtown region looking for our hotel. I took a few pictures of the building, but none of them do the spectacular building any justice.
We missed a lot of dining options, including the BBQ from Cozy Corner, Payne’s, and a biscuit sandwich from Bryant’s Breakfast. That’ll have to wait until Gonerfest 9, I suppose.
On my recent trip to Los Angeles, I was coming flying back to New York through San Francisco, which was a bit longer than I had originally planned, but while there, I had the pleasure of carefully studying, Television: TV in the Antenna Age, the exhibit of vintage television hardware (and some memorabilia, too) at the SFO Airport Museum.
If you know me, you know that this is exactly the kind of thing that excites so many of my interests—television, once new but deprecated technology, some history, and, yes, the airport location. When I used to travel through here more often when I was younger, the museum had some pretty bland exhibits. I can’t even remember any of them, except for a sports-related one around football season, that were as exciting as the current exhibit.
I spent about an hour going through all of the hardware, and I snapped a lot of photos. Some of the my favorite pieces were the various TV-radio combinations. I like the idea of all-in-one devices, and one was designed to have programmed all of the New York City radio and television stations that you could press a button and it would automatically tune to that station. “It just works.”
The portable television sets were also novel since portability in the 1960s was remarkably advanced fifty years ago. Some of those sets were as small as 4-inches in size, which isn’t much bigger than a current smartphone screen.
If you’re at SFO and have a layover (or, more likely, a delay) stop by Terminal 3 and have a look, or just look at my photo album.
Much like I did last year for Labor Day Weekend, I had the pleasure of going to Southern California for a long weekend, which ended up for a couple of reasons a little longer than I had originally planned. The weekend was pretty relaxing, in fact, but there was a few things I got to do.
My dad had been wanting to buy a camera for a few months now since his existing point-and-shoot was insufficient for taking photos of the nephew. On the Saturday, we drove down to the Fairfax district to Samy’s Camera for a little camera shopping. He settled on the Canon EOS 60D, the kit with the 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS UD Zoom Lens and the very popular Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 prime lens. We got to try out the camera right away, taking photos of my nephew at his home in Sylmar but also in Santa Barbara, where I was interviewed for the KCSB Documentary, currently in production.
As I’ve traveled to visit my family over the last couple of years, I’ve resisted renting a car and relying on the Southland’s somewhat limited transportation system. To get to Santa Barbara, my dad and I took Amtrak from Union Station, which we had to drive to reach, to Santa Barbara, on both the commuter-like Pacific Surfliner and the Coast Starlight, akin to a more canonical passenger rail. It was a first for both of us.
The trip was also memorable because it was the first time since I left home for college that I saw my mom for two consecutive weeks. She was here for an eight-day span, from August 23 to August 31, extended because Hurricane Irene had cancelled all flights in and out of New York for an entire weekend. The following day, I boarded my flight bound for LAX, and I saw there until I left on Tuesday, September 6.
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A funny thing happened on the way back from a Labor Day-weekend trip from Los Angeles.
I was scheduled to go from Burbank to Newark, via a connection in San Francisco. The flight from Burbank went as smooth as a flight could go, except for spilling club soda on myself, but what can you do? The other flight however was oversold, and they were looking for volunteers. This happened to me last year, and I was so pleased with the compensation that I always try to volunteer whenever possible. It’s what it’s known as Volunteer Denied Boarding, or VDB.
It turns out that they needed my seat, and about a dozen others, and I stayed behind, for a little compensation, of course.
Travel Credits
United’s policy is to offer $400 in travel credits, in $100 increments, and these are useful to have throughout the year. The best part is that, unlike the old free trip vouchers, these actually accrue mileage.
Hotel Voucher
Since I am an out-of-towner in San Francisco, the airline provided me a free hotel voucher. It was at the Holiday Inn Express in Burlingame, a relatively dingy property compared to the other Holiday Inn Express properties I’ve stayed. I did manage to get a full night’s sleep and a shower so that’s all I really need.
Amenities Kit
A few years ago I learned that if your bag leaves without you and you are stranded overnight, the airline will provide you with an amenities kit with your standard toiletries. To get one, simply go to the airline’s baggage claim office, present your baggage claim check, and you’ll get your kit.
Upgrade to Business Class
Instead of being rebooked on the first flight out of Newark, I was offered a business class seat to JFK. Last year, I got a double upgrade to First Class but Business class will do just fine.
Meal Voucher
I’m not exactly sure why I got one of these, but I received a dinner voucher. Since everything was closed by the time I got all my compensation coupons, I used it for lunch at Yankee Pier. The voucher didn’t cover my entire bill, but it was nice to have subsidized seafood at an airport. Much better than your usual airport offerings.
I’m about to board my flight to JFK so almost all the goodies have been used up. All that’s left is to figure out where to go with those travel credits.
It took over two years, but Sarah and I diligently visited eight distilleries that are (or were) participants of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. We started in May 2008 at Buffalo Trace, outside of Lexington, and finished last November at Four Roses in Lawrenceburg, and there were several more distilleries in between.
The eight distilleries were:
Buffalo Trace (no longer a participant in the passport program)
Maker’s Mark
Woodford Reserve
Tom Moore (no longer a participant in the passport program)
Heaven Hill
Jim Bean
Wild Turkey
Four Roses
The tours ranged from very short primers to extended tours lasting hours. For example, the tours at Jim Beam and Wild Turkey were very short, consisting of a brief explanation of how they make bourbon followed by a couple of free samples. Heaven Hill’s was even shorter. We just file into a barrel-shaped tasting room to taste a few of their offerings.
On the other hand, the tour at Tom Moore lasted nearly four hours on a very ugly functionally designed factory with no tasting. Woodford Reserve, although also a very long tour, was on a beautiful piece of land and was a much better experience. We gladly paid for the five-dollar Corn to Cork tour there, and it was a treat, especially since you get to see the whole process and sample along the way.
In either case, part of the appeal of going to all of these distilleries is the passport program. Once you get your passport stamped from all of the participating distilleries, you get a free gift (a t-shirt, if I recall). After finishing our last tour at Four Roses in November 2010, we dispatched our passports to the processing office for our free gifts. We thought it would take a month or two, but it is now August, and there’s still no sign of our gifts.
I just thought about this today, so I’m going to write them a letter and ask them nicely to send our gifts.
In the meantime, I’d like everyone to see that we did indeed go to all of the distilleries on the Bourbon Trail, even ones that have left the program.
While in our nation’s capital this past weekend, we noticed the exceptional size of the big dimple at the bottom of our pint glasses. The dimple is there, you see, to make a pint glass hold less than an actual 16-ounce pint of your beverage. (Shocking, I know.)
While this didn’t strike us as completely remarkable, what was surprising was that this pint glass could barely hold 12 oz. of beverage. I know because I asked for a 12 oz. bottle of beer and carefully poured it into my glass. Without any head, the glass was filled to the brim. Wow!
In another test, Kent and I split a 22 oz. of Blue Point’s Rastafar Rye, and when got our glasses, we were able to almost fill both glasses. You can see the results in the photo. (I should point out that the one of the left is a little lower because I had taken a sip out of it.)
In any case, I don’t really care if I get 12 oz. instead of 16 oz. because I’ve figured out long ago that a “pint glass” really held about 14 ounces. But missing a quarter of a beer, as draught drinkers are doing at this place, might draw a more angered response.
A few weeks ago, I won two free round-trip tickets on United-Continental to anywhere they fly in the following territories:
United States (48 state + Alaska)
Canada
Mexico
Central America
Caribbean
It’s a cool prize, except that finding availability is a little challenging. Also, the seats are in economy class, and sadly, the tickets are not upgradable (elite upgrades don’t apply nor can you upgrade with miles.)
But I am simply unsure where to go. Any suggestions?
When I was younger, I wasn’t crazy about Bastille Day being in the summer mostly because we never got to celebrate it at school. Instead, on our last day of school, Bastille Day was grouped together with all of the kids born in the summer gathered at the front of the classroom, and we toasted a batch of juice and cupcakes.
But over the years, I’ve enjoyed Bastille Day in July. For one thing, having lived a decade in a place with seasons, it’s much less depressing to have celebrate this day in the summer than, say, in the middle of winter. For one thing, we get to be outside, and over the years, I’ve taken advantage of the warmer climate.
This past weekend, Sarah took me on a weekend trip to Cold Spring. I had been through here twice on bike rides, but I never got to stay there. Sarah reserved us a room at the celebrated Pig Hill Inn, we brought our bikes on the Metro North, and we headed up for a weekend.
On our first day, we biked to Hyde Park, following Route 9D and Route 9, and two paved rail trails, and then for a visit to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. The trip to the Presidential Library was a personal mission of mine to visit as many as I can. So far, I’ve covered the Nixon, Kennedy, and Franklin Roosevelt, so I have a lot of ground to cover still. We got lost a lot so the bike ride took a long time, but I’m anxious to try it again.
The second day was an amazing kayak trip to Bannerman Island to tour the ruins of Bannerman Castle. Having never really kayaked before, it was really amazing to be able to paddle nearly 3.5 miles each way to an abandoned castle on an island in the middle of Hudson River. While the tour was ho-hum, and we didn’t get to see as much as I had hoped, getting there by kayak on a 90 degree day was really invigorating.
