I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the best person to ask about booking cash flights. For domestic flights, I usually just go to Kayak, search, click on the lowest price, book directly with the airline, pay for it on my Arrival and redeem points against it. I did Skiplagged once on a one-way, and I do like Google Flights and Hipmunk, but for the most part, I don’t look around too much when I book domestic flights. Most of the time, I’ll usually use Alaska’s Companion Pass and book 2 RT’s for the wife and I.
Anyway, I was chatting with Daniel from ‘dem flyers, a new blog, who was helping me book from Sydney to Queenstown. I’ll go through my entire booking process in tomorrow’s post which involved me looking at awards and even a BRG, but eventually I just paid cash. So like normal, I went to Google Flights and pulled up my flight options. The price is $248 USD, which is what I normally would have booked.
However, Daniel told me to book on the New Zealand’s version of the Virgin Australia web site, and sure enough, when I did that, here is the price – $347 NZD:
Now how much is $347 NZD? Well, it’s only $224 USD, which is $24 cheaper than if I booked directly on Orbitz.
Lastly, I wasn’t sure where to credit those Virgin Australia miles. I looked on Where to Credit and chose to credit it to Delta at 50%.
Now a couple of notes here:
- I did have to pay a $20 NZD charge ($13 USD) for using a Mastercard to pay. This was for 2 tickets; I don’t know how much it would have been for 1 person.
- Make sure you use a credit card with no foreign transaction fees (I used A+ so I can redeem points)
- This doesn’t work ALL THE TIME, but you should always at least look on the international sites. I noticed the same thing when I looked at the Hyatt Ziva Puerto Vallarta. My German friend had a similar incident; booking a rental car on a German site was cheaper than a US site.
- Don’t know the URL for the international version? Usually you can just go to say expedia.com and look at the very bottom and you’ll see flags for other countries. Some sites will let you change countries in the top title bar. Just look around.
You were lucky that VA accepted your A+. On Alitalia, I had to use PP for an intra-Italy flight. The savings were pretty substantial, $270 vs $370.
Why wouldn’t they though? This was my first time purchasing from a foreign site. I’ll keep your PP idea in mind though if I can’t use A+ in the future.
When I enter the payment info, it reverted back to US/en website and the $370 price. I remember someone mention this as a bypass during the United/Danish fiasco earlier this year.
Ah okay good to know
Yup, and it was Google Flights that directed me to the foreign site.
Yeah, shoutout to Daniel!!! 😀
Same experience here…I need to book a flight for someone coming from India, and when I checked Google Flights and even Citi Thank You portal, the best I could find was $1089. The person in India gave me a popular OTA website in India and a discount code, and when I converted the price in rupees to USD, it was like $860! Not as huge a difference as yours, but still appreciated savings.