Reader David B. pointed me to Scott McCartney’s column in the Wall Street Journal on what to do — and what not to do — to try to save money on airfare.

Here are 8 important ways to save money:



What does Scott suggest?

Shop for one ticket at a time and you may save a lot of money.

True, a given flight may have only one seat left at the lowest fare. If you search for 2 or more seats you’ll only be presented with higher fares. You may also be able to simultaneously buy one ticket at that lower price with different browsers from more than one booking site.

He suggests also:



Buying a positioning flight and a ticket that takes advantage of a fare war



Checking codeshare partners.

Goodness knows that when American and US Airways started codesharing they were consistently underpricing each other for the same flights.

Scott says to avoid hidden city ticketing and fuel dumps.

On hidden city tickets he warns,

This plan may sound tempting, but it’s dangerous. Airline computers look for hidden-city offenses and can charge fliers the highest fare it has to the city where they ended up. Some have canceled a traveler’s elite frequent-flier status or confiscated all miles in an account. Hidden-city ticketing also hurts other fliers because it often prompts airline computers to overbook or raise prices.

Airlines don’t generally charge walkup fares to people who use hidden city ticketing. That’s just wrong. Airlines do send debit memos to travel agencies who are regularly using the practice for their customers, but not individual travelers. Someone who frequently uses the technique and credits miles to their airline frequent flyer account could conceivably have their account shut down, which is why I advise not crediting miles to the airline you’re flying if you do this.

I think it’s a mistake to broadly declare that the technique hurts other fliers. He says airlines ‘overbook and raise prices’ to compensate. But they overbook now, they’re quite good at it, and the practice actually does keep down airfares. They rarely involuntarily deny boarding to passengers, something very expensive to the airline if they do. It’s just one factor that goes into the overbooking calculation which, when the airline bets wrong, causes them to over voluntary denied boarding compensation.

For ‘fuel dumps’ he says,

ut airlines say the trick violates fare rules and they impose penalties, so it isn’t worth trying.

You can’t really call extra attention to your tickets, by trying to change flights or upgrade with a carrier like American that re-issues tickets in such a case. You could find yourself facing an ‘add collect’ if you draw scrutiny, where you’re asked to pay the surcharge. No doubt adding strange unrelated segments to the end of your ticket looks weird, though there’s nothing improper about it.

What does concern me, depending on the airline, is adding an unrelated first segment to a trip which – if the onward carriers knew you skipped it, could cause them to cancel the rest of the itinerary.

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