What are suggestion for buying plane tickets?

laurabarn · October 2011

I have heard several different things about times of the year and different sites to get the best prices for plane tickets to Hawaii... Everything that I have seen is VERY expensive so I would LOVE some suggestions or things you found useful when buying plane tickets

starlite7378 · October 2011

If you have twitter, I would suggest you follow @HawaiianFares because they tweet sales all the time! (mostly from the west coast) totally helpful to get in on good deals. It's not always the cheapest, though.

I also use kayak.com's alert function to get updates on prices. There's also the tool to show you which departure dates will give you a cheaper price.

According to various airfare tips, cheapest flights are found online on Tuesdays at 3pm EST. But I've found that prices don't usually get any lower after 12pm EST, so you don't necessarily have to wait til 3pm on Tuesdays!

Typically September thru right before Christmas is pretty cheap to go to HNL. February is also cheap!

I suppose it depends where you're departing from, but in my experience, LAX-- />HNL can range between $330-500 for an average RT fare. A few times, I had to fly back to HNL at $800, but that was usually during the Christmas holiday. I try to fly Delta all the time (glutton for pain), but I've also found good prices with AA, United, and Hawaiian.

HTH!

WinstonsGirl · October 2011

I used a lot of the sites mentioned above, but we booked our tickets right through the airlines website. I checked daily, sometimes a couple of times per day for the flights I wanted, and waited till they dropped. I got to know the cheapest prices so far, based on seeing them when they first were posted and going with that. We booked $339 each way from Edmonton, but we booked 1 way at a time, booking our departing flight several weeks before our return flight dropped in price too.

Sp2012 · October 2011

I signed up for fare alerts on kayak.com and airfarewatchdog.com also bing.com has a travel predictor I'm getting email notices pretty frequently so I can keep an eye on price drops. Also many airlines have group travel rates for 5% off, just google "wedding travel rate" and your airline of choice fo details. Not a huge discount, but nice to offer.

Jaime Dieringer · October 2011

If you have good credit, apply for the Alaska Airlines Visa Card. If you can get the signature card, you get 25k miles and a $100 companion ticket. So my fiance and I are able to get a 2 RT tickets (plus the 100 dollars) basically getting two tickets for one, and then are flying our daughter over on the miles. It helped us so much, three tickets to Hawaii would be so much without doing this.