Okay, so we just booked our flights to Australia for a trip over Christmas.

I know.  Crazy.

We’ve never booked this far in advance before, but just couldn’t pass up the current sale that Qantas is having.

Flights to Australia over Christmas are usually at least double the normal price and even the agents kept commenting what a great deal it was that we were getting.

This leads me to the first tip on how to save, which is to watch for sales for the airlines on which you travel. We always travel on American and Qantas.  Many airlines have an RSS feed for their sales information.  Knowing that Qantas was having this unreal sale prompted us to start making some decisions.  They also posted their fares for the next 12 months, so we knew this was going to be the best deal for the dates we wanted to travel.

Also, although you can often get some great deals online, we nearly always book through an agent.  This time we saved quite a bit by booking through an agent instead.  Sometimes agents can let you in on rules (i.e. tricks!) that you may not have known.  We learn something new from an agent almost every year.

Note that booking through an agent sometimes comes with a fee ($15-$20), but the savings in this instance more than compensated.

Here are our tips regarding booking with an agent instead of online.

Online Fare Quotes. We were looking online last night and it was quoting us $400 more than what we were quoted by an agent and the flight home wasn’t direct.  We got a direct flight going through an agent and for less money.

You can play around with dates. With an agent, they can easily tell you what dates are available around the time you are looking.  We were originally looking at different set of dates, but were able to get something that worked even better with the agents suggestions.

You can put flights on hold. This is one of my favorite features of speaking with an agent.  I hate when I find a fabulous deal online, only to go back a day, or sometimes even an hour later only to find out it’s gone!  Most international flights can be held for 3 days.  Usually domestic flights can be held for 24 hours.

Award Travel. You have to book with the airline that you have the award travel with.  So, we had to book our award flights to Los Angeles, return, with American, then the International, Los Angeles to Brisbane return, portion through Qantas.  This way, we could use our award miles, which saved us about $900.

Did you know this about award miles? We learned that adults earn more miles when flying than children do (at least on American Airlines).  Which is dumb considering the flights cost the same (i.e. no discount for kids).

So, my husband and I had enough points for two award seats.  But, instead of using them for us, we used them for me and Big D.  My husband’s seat is a paid flight, so he will earn points…more than what Big D would have earned for the same seat and cost.  I had no idea.  I also didn’t know that we could even use our points to buy flights for someone else.

Tips on saving money with kids.

Infant with Seat. This is a new offering on Qantas, apparently.  This is the same price as the child fare (which is 75% of an adult fare from ages 2 to 12) but the taxes are less.  This doesn’t make much sense to me as to why the cost of the ticket would be the same but the taxes less, but whatever.

So, check with the airline you are flying to see if they offer discounts for infants or children.

Holding an Infant. Since there are only three seats together on domestic flights (rather than the four you can get on the larger International aircraft), we decided to hold Little C on the domestic flight.  It’s five hours, but we figure we can manage (we hope).

We could not book it like this online, so going through an agent and booking the flights separately, saved us $456 since we opted to hold Little C.

So, all in all, we got an unbelievable deal!  Just over $3100 for four people to Australia return.  And we learned some new tips to go into our repertoire for next time.  And even better…we didn’t even use half of what we budgeted for!

What are your tips for saving money on flights?  Do you know any tricks for earning/using award miles?

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04/07/2009 | Australia, Money Management, Travel.

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