Crazy Airfares Offered This Week

Here's what's happening in the wacky world of airfares this week.

Airtran $25 Coupon

Airtran is offering a $25 coupon good for travel thru June 24 to/from Atlanta if you sign up for their "special offers" alerts before February 15. It's a good idea to sign up anyway, since they often send out discount coupon codes in their emails.

Midwest Airlines Sale

Midwest Airlines has lowered fares between 10 and 20% on various routes for travel February 18 through June 10. Other airlines are matching, although Midwest flies many of these routes nonstop and the others don't. Purchase tickets by February 18.

Paris in August Still on Sale, but Seats Harder to Find

Although seats are becoming scarce on many dates, you can still fly on US Air to Paris in the $600's round trip including tax from many US airports in late August and through September. On other summer dates, fares remain stubbornly high at over twice that much. We continue to list many of these fares as we find seats.

Europe Spring Travel on Sale

Speaking of (relatively) cheap seats to Europe, many airlines have sort of reasonable fares for outbound travel through April 2 with a 30 day maximum stay, meaning you can be in Europe through early May. Springtime, of course, is the ideal time to visit Europe, but since most people take their vacations in July and August that's when the airlines jack up prices. We found some really great deals especially to Dublin, such as Los Angeles or San Francisco to Dublin at $393 round trip including taxes, and Aer Lingus is having a spring and summer sale, which ends February 20, to Europe with relatively decent fares.

The Irish carrier's business class fares to Ireland have also been greatly reduced for spring and summer travel, on sale through February 28.

. We're finding that unadvertised international fares are changing almost daily recently, going up $100 one day, and down the same amount the next. So check frequently. We invite you to poke around our international destination search box, which will show you all the fares we've found to a particular international destination. Often, we find, a fare to London from, say, Chicago will be $600, but from St. Louis it might be $1200. So by adding a cheap St. Louis to Chicago fare on top of the ex-Chicago international fare, you can play travel agent and save a ton of money.

Australia Still on Sale for (Down Under) Summer Travel

We're not sure if anyone really wants to visit Australia right now, what with the fires and all, but it's certainly seldom been a better time to buy fares. United is still offering no advance purchase peak season fares to Sydney. From LA, for example, you'll pay just $808 round trip including tax. We usually see this price point for off peak travel with advance purchase restrictions, and indeed if you surf over to Qantas.com, which was matching this United sale for a while, you'll see that their off peak fares for travel May 1 to September 21, with a last purchase date of February 27, are much higher.

Cincinnati Suddenly Cheaper

This airport used to have some of the most expensive fares in the country, since it's a Delta "stronghold" (some would say "stranglehold") hub. But suddenly Delta realized that people were voting with their feet (or cars) and driving to other nearby, cheaper airports. So overnight, CVG became much cheaper to fly into and out of. See their new low fares from and to the Queen City.

Be Flexible and Save

If you can adjust your travel dates a bit, or a lot, you'll often fly for less. We've noticed that many airlines Web sites (such as aerlingus.com, jetlbue.com, aa.com, and airfrance.us) now by default send you to flexible date search results, which we applaud. But they usually only offer results over a one week to one month period. We've put together a handy chart showing some of the airline and "third party" (i.e., Travelocity, Kayak, and such) sites that also offer flexible date searching and how to use them.