Airplane
If you are a cost-conscious flyer, getting a good deal shouldn’t be just about finding a competitively priced ticket. You need to be on the lookout for savings throughout your trip. If you aren’t careful, you can easily wipe out whatever you save on your ticket deal by getting taken for every airline extra there is.
Each year, the airline industry comes up with dozens of new. While half of them are usually baggage-related, the rest are for services – ticket changes, seat selection, priority boarding, in-flight entertainment, food and beverage service and so on.
Here are a few tips on how you can keep the airlines from nickel and diming your savings away.
Learn about your airline’s policies ahead of time
The best way to stay clear of airline fees is to look up resources like Travel Nerd to find out what each airline charges for. Visiting airline websites for information may not be a good idea – they don’t usually list all their fees in one place. Both JetBlue and Southwest are perennial good deals because they don’t charge baggage fees. You can save $20 on each bag simply by picking these airlines.
If you do travel on an airline that charges you for your bags, you need to read up what the airline’s size and weight restrictions are and make sure that your bags pass. If you get a discount for paying your baggage fees online, you should do so. Spirit Airlines, for instance, has a rule where they charge you $45 for a carry-on if you pay online and $100 for the same carry-on if you pay at the airport.
Take your own food and entertainment with you
Airlines can charge excessively for any snacks that you buy in-flight. On Frontier Airlines, for instance, a bag of peanut M&Ms costs $2.99 and a can of Pepsi costs $1.99. You can easily save a few dollars bringing your own food with you.
Charging for in-flight entertainment isn’t new. Airlines have always asked for $5 for the use of airline headphones to listen to the in-flight movie by. They still charge a similar amount if you want to tune in. If you need to use in-flight Wi-Fi to access the Internet for entertainment, you have to pay even more. To save on such expenses, you only need to board your flight well-prepared. You can gather all the informative, educational, and entertainment videos you want at home and download them to your iPad or laptop with software like the YTD Video Downloader.
Finally, be careful planning your trip
No matter how hard you work trying to get the lowest-priced tickets and preparing your in-flight entertainment while still at home, your savings can get wiped out in an instant if you change your ticket. Many airlines charge as much as $150 to change or cancel a ticket. You need to plan carefully if you are to avoid this kind of situation.Remember to respect IP when using downloaded content:
