It Pays To Keep An Eye On Fare Sales, Even If It’s Not The Airline You Want To Fly

Most people look for cheap flights by hunting on Expedia, Travelocity and the like.  If prices aren’t to your liking and you have time, you wait and check back periodically, hoping for something better.  There are some other tools people use frequently to help find cheap tickets.  But, largely, it’s a game of hunting for the right fare if you don’t buy tickets often.

One good way to keep an eye out for low fares is to subscribe to newsletters from your favorite airline to know when they have a fare sale.  Southwest is famous for lots of fare sales (they actually have one going on right now).  Those can be very helpful.  But, sometimes it’s the newsletter from the airline you’re not planning to fly that will give you the best info.

Virgin America is having a fare sale for the next couple days.

From the list in the graphic above, you can see that Virgin America has discounted the route between Washington (IAD) and LAX to $159 in each direction.  That’s not as low as the $99 fares we used to see, but I think this is pretty close to the “new low”.  The fall is also back to business travel time for the airlines so you can expect planes to be fuller and tickets a bit more expensive.

I consider this a pretty low fare for that route, but I don’t think that highly of Virgin America’s loyalty program.  If only I could find that price on one of my preferred airlines, American and United.  That’s the thing.  Both airlines appear to be matching these fares.

I only checked a couple of routes but I saw lots of matching dates throughout the schedule, including on the route out of my home airport (IAD-LAX).

Virgin American doesn’t do a ton of fare sales so it won’t add much junk to your inbox.  And, it just might save you some money for an upcoming trip!