Even if you had the time to sit at your computer and wait for the best airfares, would you actually do it? I didn't think so. No one values a low airfare that much. At the same time, budget travelers are not satisfied by paying the first fare that pops up on their monitors. So here are five tools -- in no particular order -- that help cut through the confusion and give you timely information on the costs for a given flight. Try checking several at the same time to establish a baseline price for your airfare shopping.
Subscribe your email address for daily updates on low fares, visit a blog where the day's best finds are posted and a daily top 50 airfares. Most people are a bit nervous about subscribing an email address to services such as this, but the front page pledges here are "we do not sell or trade email lists," and "easy unsubscribe." You can tailor the alerts they send you to your home airport(s). They also have a "low fare of the day" feature
The FareWatch tool is tied to the U.S. Department of Transportation data bases. You simply select a departure city from a drop-down menu and click "go." Choose a destination city in the same way. Find out more about how it works with the USDOT to find fares.
Internet Airfares is tied to Worldspan, a data base for travel agents. This tool provides information for 36 major cities in the United States and Canada. Simply click on the city and see the lowest fares from that airport to other cities. Excursion, advance and refundable fare categories are included.
With airfares constantly on the move, it's nice to know the range for the past 48 hours before you start shopping. Buzz allows you to survey these prices. You enter an origination airport and destination continent. You'll then receive a list of available airfares sorted from lowest to highest. This makes it possible to pick out the lowest-priced destinations at a glance.
Yapta bills itself as the first to track airfares for a specific flight before or after purchase. It notifies you when fares drop. Yapta is an acronym for "Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant."
What makes this interesting to the budget traveler is the ability to target a specific flight of your choosing and then watch the airfare as you would the price of company stock. It's done with software called a "tagger" that is downloaded to your computer.
The five tools included here are certainly not the only services at your disposal on the Internet, and you might find others that do better work for you. That's why it's important to make several base comparisons as you shop.
