Fare shopping for a Las Vegas package

There’s a conference and tradeshow in Las Vegas that I’d like to attend so I thought I’d try www.IgoUgo.com a new site at least to me to search for airfares. This is one of those web sites that will price out your air, hotel and car travel needs on a variety of travel booking search engines.

My travel dates are departing from Columbus to Vegas in the morning of December 1st 2008 with a return on Friday afternoon Dec 5th 2008. At www.IgoUgo.com I had a selection of 12 web sites to price my air trip on. Orbitz.com, Travelocity.com, Hotwire.com all of the major search vehicles were present so with one click my travel requirements was sent to a dozen sites.

My faithful old computer took its time but site by site and side by side the results were finally displayed. As expected there was very little difference in the air fare. The lowest fares were all on Continental Airlines (CO) and ranged from $332.00 thru $340.00 with the difference being the taxes based on the route flown plus some small booking fees.

Next step was to visit Continental.com and check directly with the source. Same dates, same time and same fare of $337.50. Armed with a Continental Airline affinity credit card it makes sense to me that when I am ready to book I’ll will have my travel agent book it on their agents only Continental web portal directly plus I’ll with the CO credit card. This will earn me extra OnePass (frequent flyer program) bonus miles plus I’ll collect mile on my flown segments.

But there are still two more research steps to be completed so I hope the $337.50 fare last for about 15 minutes. Step two is researching air & hotel package prices and step three is to price the hotel separately. I’ll combine the hotel prices with the air and essentially create my own package.

There are 4 Las Vegas hotels that I’m going to price out-the Imperial Palace, Excalibur, Luxor and the Tropicana. I am going to keep all the variables-dates, times, carrier and hotels the same so I can determine the best value.

Next I will analyze and interpret the data then make my reservation.

Hopefully this process will only take a matter of minutes for me as I am aware of what sites to search but this could take the novice travel planner much longer as you sort through the multitude of air & hotel package web sites .

For the novice travel planner you may want to get a travel agent involved and have them check out the package deals for you.

It’s time to resume my search so I’m signing off & but will report my findings later.