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Condé Nast Traveler highlighted a company called Concorde today. Their website is a flight deal aggregator that Condé Nast Traveler refers to as a tool for “impulsive travelers”.
They write:
Here’s how it works: Head to the site’s “Deals” tab, and start browsing. From there, you can narrow your options by choosing a departure month. October? Sure, why not. Users can also set up an account and sign in to the “Discover” section (new this month) to customize their profile, which will let them choose departure dates and airports, and sort options by cost-per-mile.
Since I love flight deals, I checked the website out.
If the article did not tell me how to sign-up on the website, I wouldn’t have known you could do that. Â I actually thought I read the article wrong and went back to double-check whether or not you can actually sign up.
After using the site for a little bit, I decided it isn’t something I would rely on for my deals.  There’s also a slight disconnect between certain parts of the site.  I feel like some things are built for advanced frequent flyer and other parts are built for novices, and they don’t play together well.
First, while being able to filter for your home airport is a nice feature, I’d rather know what the best deals are over all.  That way, I can position myself to wherever the best place to fly from is, and take the vacation I want to take the most.  So this seems like a feature geared more towards novice flyers.
But if it is geared towards novice flyers, the sign-up process would be confusing. Â It uses a lot of frequent flyer jargon and you select your home airport via a drop down list of every airport code in the world.
Ultimately, the creator says that he takes what the Flight Deal does and makes it more user-friendly. Â I think right now, the website isn’t at “user-friendly” yet, which makes it more difficult to use than the Flight Deal.
So how DO you browse flight deals?
I love to use the website the Flight Deal. Â They tweet all their deals, so I follow the stream of (seemingly) unending potential destinations daily.
The Flight Deal lists the deals in blog format, but you can also search deals by destination and originating airport.
The most useful part of the Flight Deal, I think, is its Twitter feed. You don’t have to actively decide to browse travel deals. Â If you keep a tab open with the Flight Deal’s twitter feed in your browser, or create a column for it in TweetDeck, you can watch the deals pour in all day long.
What I really like about the Flight Deal is that they explain why something is a good deal, or things to know. Â (For example, Wow will charge you for bags over 22lbs).
I subscribe to the Flight Deals tweets and check them pretty often. Â I may have booked deals during work meetings. Â (If my boss is reading this, disregard the last sentence).
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.
I’ve shared my process of “subscribing†to great fares.
This process involves signing up for twitter.  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.
You can see my post on this here.
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.
