Travel

One of the things that sort of kept us from repeating our 1992 trip to Big Sky, Montana admittedly was the cost. Salt Lake City is almost always a much cheaper option to fly into for us Hogs from Chicago. In fact, it's often about half of what it costs to fly to Montana. Invariably, many of our ski trips have either sent us to Salt Lake or Denver merely for economic reasons.

This year, Caveman was determined that we go somewhere different. Sun Valley, Idaho was one option, with Banff/Lake Louise the other, but Big Sky was always the priority when planning this years' boys' ski trip. We began checking for flights and availability for the March trip sometime after Christmas. We had seen fares as high as 600 dollars round trip, and fares as low as 400 dollars. The one thing we had going for us though was time. Since we allotted a whole week for the trip, we thought our flexibility as far as time and date would help us as well. 

As is the case so many times, when you are looking for a deal, it never seems to materialize. This happened once before on a trip to Cancun. We paid an enormous sum of money, only to find out that the following week was much cheaper. Flexibility is always your friend when trying to save a few dollars on your trip. It seemed the vacation God was peeing all over our heads though.

Finally, Joe suggested we try Priceline or Hotwire. With a low fare of 401 dollars, I decided to give Hotwire a spin. Hotwire does require you to sign up with their site before you can begin asking for quotes on their flights. Whereas Priceline asks you to bid on a flight, Hotwire returns their lowest possible fare to you. There's a catch though. You don't know if you have a non-stop flight (they guarantee at most one stop for at most 3 hours) and you don't know what airline or the flight times until AFTER you pay for the ticket. 

I received a price quote of 278 dollars for a flight leaving March 13 and returning March 20. Since this was a Thursday-Thursday arrangement, I wanted to double check with Philster and Joe to see if this was OK. Unfortunately for me, Hotwire only holds that price for you for two hours. After that, it is withdrawn. The kicker is that you cannot search for the same destination in the same way for another 48 hours! I did find a neat little trick around this later on (select Jet instead of Jet/Turbo Prop as one of your preferences. It changes the search request enough so that you can reload the quote). When I re-entered my dates of departure for the second time, Hotwire returned with an eye popping price of only 241 dollars. I immediately grabbed this price.

After entering my credit card, the flights were returned to me. I was on a United flight to Denver with an hour and 10 minute layover before boarding a flight to Bozeman. My return flight was equally convenient and both were in the middle of the day, so no early morning or late night red eye flights! Joe booked out of Dallas and surprise, surprise got the same arrival time and flight to Bozeman. His return overlapped perfectly. Philster booked out of Chicago. While he didn't get the 241 dollar fare (his was 278), he did get the exact flights we did.

So, all in all Hotwire saved me 160 dollars on a roundtrip flight. However, buried in this savings are some "hidden costs" to the traveler. Because we booked through a discounter that has a special arrangement with the airline, we were not eligible for frequent flyer miles on our flight. This cost us approximately 2500 miles, which if valued at the 0.02/mile the airlines carry as a liability for every frequent flyer, that's a 50 dollar charge to our FF account. 

Philster hates to sit in a middle row. Unfortunately for him though, he could not upgrade to an aisle or a window, or an exit row for that matter. Hotwire travelers are assigned the worst seats in coach. That means middle seats, seats in the last row in the back of the plane, or seats that don't recline. Traveling coach is one thing, but this is the bottom of the coach seat barrel. 

We also found out during our trip that Hotwire or Priceline customers are the LAST consideration for the airlines when it comes to re-booking you due to weather delays. During our trip, we realized that Denver airport, our hub for the trip, would be hit big time with a major snow storm. The storm hit on the Tuesday we were supposed to leave. On Thursday, our scheduled day of departure, DIA was still closed. Philster and I were not able to get flights out until late Saturday and we had to fly to Denver, then to Omaha and finally to Chicago. Caveman could not fly out until Sunday and thus had to stay an extra day in Denver. 

It was obvious that we could have flown home on Friday had it not been for the Hotwire arrangement. Because of the war, there weren't nearly as many travelers backed up at DIA. United did accommodate us, but we left a day later than we would have had we booked normal seats. That cost us an extra 45 dollars each, with Joe paying even more with the extra night. In the end, the Hotwire experience turned out to be a wash for Joe and saved us a little overall. 

Would I do it again? Without a doubt. Even with the loss of frequent flyer miles. If you are flexible enough to leave at different days or different times, Hotwire or Priceline may save you even more than the 160 they saved me initially. Just be mindful of some of the indirect costs involved. 

Hopefully, you'll be booked on a relatively empty flight so you can avoid the discomfort of a Hotwire seat in Coach.

TOP OF THIS PAGE