Section 8.1. Booking Tickets and Reservations | iPhone: The Missing Manual, 4th Edition

8.1. Booking Tickets and Reservations

People plan trips in different ways. Some spend weeks doing meticulous research on the area's attractions, and then schedule events right down to the nanosecond. Other travelers just wake up one Friday, decide to skip work and start the weekend early, and buy a ticket to the cheapest interesting destinationallotting an hour to pack and get to the airport.

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Mega- travel sites like Expedia and Travelocity make it very convenient to buy plane tickets. As great as some of the bargains are, however, they don't include the fares of all airlines. Some of them, notably Jet Blue, Southwest, and regional carriers , don't make their routes and tickets available to the travel sites.

The bottom line: If you use the mega-travel sites, you may be missing deals that you weren't even aware of.

Of course, you can always check fares and book tickets on an airline's own Web siteif you know it services your city. You may even save a few bucks buying directly from the airline, since mega-travel sites like Orbitz, Travelocity, and Expedia usually tack a $5 "processing fee" onto your purchase. If you have no idea where to start, though, you don't have to click around tediously until you find something cheaper than what Orbitz is offering.

That's because there's such a thing as a meta -travel site. This is a supersearch site that rises above the fray and searches other travel sites around the Web, including individual airline pages and the big travel sites as well. Some of these meta-travel search engines include SideStep (www.sidestep.com ), Mobissimo (www.mobissimo.com ), and Kayak (Section 8.1.4).

You can't buy your tickets directly from one of these search sites. Still, they do all the hard work for you by scanning over 100 other travel sites at once. If you find a flight that fits, you just have to click a link to bop right over there.

Most travel search sites also include hotel and rental car providers, too. Using one of these sites means adding a tiny bit of time to your booking ritualbut what you lose in time, you can more than make up for in money if you score a bargain flight.

No matter how you like to travel, though, there's a Web site that can keep up with you. With the advent of the e-ticket a ticket receipt and boarding pass issued at the airportyou don't even have to wait for an old-fashioned paper ticket to arrive in the mail. You just get to the airport, swipe your credit card through a kiosk at the airline's check-in counter (for I.D. purposes only), and collect the boarding pass that's printed on the spot. Then you show your government-issued ID (like a driver's license or green card) when you check your bags at the counter and go get in line at the metal detectors.

Buying a plane ticket on the Web is simplespecify the airports you want to use, plus the dates and times of travel. You can indicate how many people are traveling together, which airlines you prefer, and what seating class you'd like.

The travel site brings you a page showing all the flights that match your chosen travel dates and times. If you find a flight you like, follow the Web site's instructions for booking the flight. You can usually select your own seat from a seating charta clickable map of the actual model of plane you'll be riding . For the flights that still serve food, you can choose meals with special dietary preferences like low-sodium, vegetarian, or meals that conform to religious observations.

Tip: Excited about picking your own seat? First consult the SeatGuru at www.seatguru.com, where you can see seating charts and floor plans for just about every type of airplane. SeatGuru colorcodes the especially good and bad seats on each planewhich ones are noisy because they're over the engines, which ones have extra legroomand provides basic information about the aircraft, onboard amenities, and other useful data.

Booking hotel rooms and rental cars works roughly the same way. At hotels, you can specify things like how many beds you want and whether you want a smoking or non-smoking room. Rental car companies let you select things like the vehicle size you need and any necessary infant or child car seats as you book online.

Yahoo, MSN, and AOL (Chapter 2) have their own little travel corners, often with special deals and discounts . But if you don't hang out on portal sites and want to go site-seeing around the Web before you pack the sunscreen, read on.

8.1.1. TripAdvisor

Travel magazines can make just about anyplace sound sophisticated and glamorous, but sometimes you can get more useful advice from people who paid their own money to go there. If you're wondering if that tiny motel in Gettysburg is a dump or want to find out whether a visit to the Biltmore Estate on your upcoming trip to Asheville would be a good way to spend the day, visit the TripAdvisor site at www.tripadvisor.com.

With four million reviews from people who had something to say about 200,000 hotels, restaurants , and attractions, you can get unadorned, unbiased advice from the site.

TripAdvisor is more than a message board full of posts and photos praising the food at a Kansas City barbecue joint or complaining about broken air conditioning at the roadside motel in Reno. It offers tools to help you plan your trip, too.

On TripAdvisor, you check out a city's most popular hotels by price, location, and rating, check pricing across a bunch of separate hotel-booking sites at once, and sign up for customized email newsletters bringing you the latest from your chosen destination before you leave. If you're in the early stages of thinking about your next vacation (which for many people starts the day they get back from their last one), spending some time with the TripAdvisor site can let you know what to expect the next time you hit the road.

Tip: Many airline Web sites now include flight-tracker pages that show a flight's current progress on the ground or in the air; you just need to know the airline and flight number to get a map of the plane's location and details of its whereabouts. (Actually, if you have a Mac, press F12 to see a Flight Tracker widget in the Dashboard feature that does the same thing.) This is helpful if you're the one picking up at the airport, because you can see if the flight has been delayed and plan your run to the Arrivals lane accordingly .

8.1.2. Travelocity

Owned by Sabre Holdings, a long-time player in the travel industry that built the first computerized reservations system in the 1960s, the Travelocity Web site at www.travelocity.com is one of the best-designed and easiest -to-use travel sites online (Figure 8-1).

Figure 8-1. Travelocity invites you to find a flight right off the bat with its prominently placed flight-search box. If there's no major airport in your town, the site gives you a list of all the ones nearby. Once you pick an airport, you can see all the fares to your desired destination.

To tempt you further into traveling, the Travelocity home page has an ideas section with articles outlining themed or regional trips.

Travelocity powers a few other sites as well, including AOL Travel and the AARP Passport service, which offers deals and discounts for members of the American Association of Retired People.

Along with flights, hotels, and cars, you can book cruises, train tickets in Europe and Canada, and full vacation packages to near and distant landsincluding Disneyland. If you're one of those get-up-and-go types, Travelocity regularly has a number of deals for cheap, last-minute trips for this weekend or next. If you're really on the hunt for a deal, sign up for the site's RSS feed (Section 5.5), which sends out an update to your Web browser or feed reader program if the fares to your favorite places drop by 20 percent or more.

8.1.3. Expedia

Expedia (www.expedia.com) is another big all-purpose travel site. (Because it was founded by Microsoft and later spun off into its own company, Expedia is also the booking muscle behind the MSN Travel Service.)

As its name suggests, Expedia's an expedient way to book a flight, hotel, and rental car all at once and potentially save a chunk of money.

Once you sign up, the site remembers your personal info (including frequent travel companions) and stores your trip details in its My Itineraries section. If you fly to the same place on a regular basis, Expedia saves completed reservations in My Itineraries; if you liked the airline route and hotel, you can use the same ones again by clicking the "Repeat trip" button (Figure 8-2, circled) and just changing the dates for your next go-around.

Figure 8-2. In the My Itineraries section, Expedia remembers where you went so if you want to go there again the exact same way, you have the information you need.

The site offers plenty of packages like ski trips, Caribbean cruises, and romantic getaways; you can easily add special tours and attractions (like Broadway tickets or a tour of Mozart's Salzburg). Expedia also offers a link to maps and driving directions right on its main page, so you don't have to wander off to another URL to see where your hotel is or how to find it.

Tip: Online travel services act as the middlemen between you and the airline, hotelier, and car rental place. It's a good idea to printor save to your hard driveall receipts and reservation confirmations . Have these documents available, on paper or on your laptop, in case there's a computer glitch or mix-up at one of your destinations.

8.1.4. Orbitz

The Orbitz site at www.orbitz.com was started by several major airlines (American, Continental, Delta, Northwest, and United) who came together to do their own version of a Web-based travel service. The site can find flights on hundreds of airlines, rooms in thousands of hotels, and transportation from a dozen different rental car places.

You can compare several hotels onscreen or search for lodging by specific amenities like a pool or business center. The hotel-search feature lets you pinpoint your hotel by brand or proximity to a tourist attraction.

Orbitz has built part of its reputation on its customer services. For example, if you sign up for the company's Care Alerts, you'll get electronic updates of traffic conditions, weather advisories, and other things to watch out for via email, cellphone, pager, or wireless palmtop.

Orbitz has its own RSS feed (Section 5.5) of daily travel deals for those afflicted with severe wanderlust and has its own package deals for baseball-game trips, Valentine vacations , and other themed getaways.

8.1.5. Kayak

As the box in Section 8.1 makes clear, not every airline shows up on the big Web travel sites. Fortunately, sites like Kayak (www.kayak.com) make sure you don't miss any of the possible flights.

Kayak is one of the best travel search engines. It tracks fares across hundreds of different airline sites and other online travel sites. It can quickly find, say, 400 different possibilities for an April trip from Newark to London.

When you get your results, the site tells you which ones are direct and which flights have stops; dragging the sliders on the page (Figure 8-3) lets you narrow down the list of possibilities based on the time of day you'd like to take off or your top ticket price.

Once you find a flight that looks good, click it; Kayak sends you to the site selling the seat so you can buy it there. You can search across multiple hotel sites just as you can with flights, and even compare rental car fees all at once.

Kayak offers trip ideas, email alerts, and RSS feeds (Section 5.5) for hot deals, and a link to specialsboth foreign and domesticfor a variety of travel budgets and moods .

Figure 8-3. When Kayak paddles back with hundreds of flights that match your query, you can narrow down the results by moving the time sliders for arrival and departure and have the results instantly reconfigure to match the new criteria.