My son needed to come home from Hawii, he was with the High School on a prepaid trip through the School however had some problems and needed to come home early. When I called the Airport to rearrange his flight and spending almost an hour on the phone with twelve different people they told me it would be 1200 dollars plus a service fee for them to redo the flight. I almost fell over, I did not have that amount available and before I borrowed it from someone I thought I would research it on my own.
Ok now to what I did. First I went on the internet and googled Airlines to see who had the cheapest rate coming back from Hawii, I found flights for all different prices but because it was immediate and not a future date (which by the way will always be cheaper-I will go into this to a bit later) it was more expensive, only about 100 dollars difference of what I was told on the phone. So in desperation I went directly to the Airlines website that he was already booked on to make the reservation for my son to come home sooner than planned, expecting to pay what I was told on the phone. However, to my surprise and astonishment it was 900 dollars less then what I was told on the phone!! I don't know why, and I did nothing out of the ordinary, I had no flight miles to cash or any other special credit.
Before going to a travel agent and spending all your money on them try going directly to the airline you want to fly with online and make the reservations yourself, you can not only make flight reservations, but rental car and hotel reservations as well and most of the time at a discounted rate, research the area of where you are going for discounts and other things that interest you as well, that is what the travel will do and what you will pay them for if you have them make the arrangements for you. Instead of spending lots of money for someone else to do your travel arrangements, taking 15 minutes to do it yourself will save you a lot of money. There are lots of deals out there you just have to look some of my favorites are Jetblue Airlines, Delta Airlines, and Southwest Airlines -easy websites to follow and very helpful people if you need to call them.
To what I said earlier about making future travel arrangements, the futher out you plan your trip the cheaper it will be. I would recommend about 30 days out and call before leaving on your trip a few days early to ensure all is in order and check your flight schedule before you leave on the day of your trip, and always be at the airport two to three hours early to avoid the long lines.
