Le Chic Geek
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During One Mile at a Time’s talk at Frequent Traveler University today, people were asking a lot of questions about how to find great deals and how to jump on them quickly.
He mentioned that he checks out the website the Fare Deal fairly often for his mileage runs. Â Ben is an airfare “power-user”–keeping track of all the ways to check on good flight prices and running searches fairly often. Â But I’ve found subscribing to the Flight Deal through things like text messaging keeps me on the ball when it comes to booking flights.
I can jump on fares when there’s still lots of availability and I don’t miss out on the deals I want to take advantage of.
Since there were so many questions about this, I thought I’d share my process of “subscribing” to great fares again:
This process involves signing up for twitter. Â Even if you won’t be an active user of twitter, it’s a good idea to have an account to take advantage of deals on contests in general.
First I have Twitter configured to send me mobile updates.
1. Click on the Gear Box at the Top
2. Select Settings
3. Click on “Mobile”
4. Make sure “Tweets you’ve enabled from people” is selected. If your phone number is not set up, it will prompt you to set that up first.
Then go over to the Flight Deal’s twitter page and follow them.
Turn on Mobile Notifications, and you are set!
I completely recommend, in your mobile settings, setting up this (though it isn’t required to receive the texts):
This way, the texts won’t wake you up.
So who should you subscribe to?
I recommend following them even if you aren’t in those areas because they are gateway cities. There’s a lot of good international deals–worth the effort flying out to the gateway.
I don’t see as much that I’m ready to jump on from them, but if you are US Airways or Delta, you’ll get good deals out of Charlotte or Atlanta, respectively. Keri and I have been wanting to go to Vegas again, and we’ve been watching these deals (and I’m tempted to drive to Philly for some of their PHL to LAS deals).
And then finally, I follow airlines via text messaging during promos.
I followed US Airways during their 30 days in DC, and was able to score $60 tickets to Pensacola, and $120 tickets to San Diego. Not bad!
What twitter feeds do you subscribe to that have great deals? I’ll add ideas as they come in.
I am on my ipad and I can’t find the little gear thing. When I go home, I will have to try and do this. eanne, FYI, we are at the Vendome for two nights. Lovely hotel.
Thorough, basic, easy, thanks!
One add to your step-by-step for the real Twit rookies like me — you have to “Follow” a Twitter page before you get the option on your drop down to do #5 “Turn on Mobile Notifications”
Thanks! I’ll add that in!
Now I presume all these deal alerts are for economy class. Right?
Most of the time, but sometimes there are great business class deals. Also, sometimes they advertise upgrade-able fare classes.