Attention college students: fly Southwest. Not only are their commercials the best, their rewards program is pretty exceptional for college students. College students, simply, get almost double everyone else.
Here is a table breaking down the sweet Southwest.com rewards… (more…)
Nas Air, the first no-frills budget airline in Saudi Arabia flew for the first time February 17. This first flight, basically for media and publicity purposes, was led literally by the CEO, who is a trained pilot.
The ticket fares offered by Nas Air reportedly have the potential to be dirt cheap. I say potential, because it depends how early you book. The earlier, the better. Also, they are supposedly offering good discounts to those who purchase online at FlyNas.com.
Nas Air will officially open to all Arabians on February 25, 2007 with flights offered on one of its three Airbus A320s. Nas Air has big plans though, and expects to become a huge player in the budget airline market. They hope to have eight planes in their fleet in a year, and plan to service 23 Saudi Arabian destinations in two years. After that, they want to go international and will have an IPO. Yeah, like I said, big plans.
This happens to remind me a lot of Jet Blue and Emirates. Jet Blue, because of their urgency to grow and aggressiveness as a young airline. Emirates because Nas Air is exploiting (in a good way) an untapped middle-class Middle Eastern market.
If Nas Air doesn’t pull a downfall like their US rapper counterpart (sorry for the pop culture reference) they could become the next RyanAir or easyJet. Watch out Saudi Arabian Airlines.
Farecast just brought its flight Price guarantee service out of its testing stage, making it available for anyone to use on their website.
I wrote an entry summarizing how Fareguard works when Farecast first announced this new, revolutionary travel booking service. Basically, travelers can be protected against any rise in ticket prices for a week for a fee of $10. It’s pretty nifty, and shows that Farecast is serious about their price predictions. If nothing else, this brings legitimacy to the Farecast predictions.
To kick of the promotion of their Fareguard Flight price guarantee, they are offering this flight insurance for only $3 for a limited time.
If you’re still confused, I don’t blame you. Just read their really good explanation of the service in their blog post about it, or check it out Farecast.com.
I’ve posted previously on Farcast in my series Online travel booking revolution, and it seems that they are continuing to make more noise in the Web 2.0 era. Farecast has launched a new product that protects travelers from rising ticket prices if their prediction is wrong.
Today, it seems like the most popular medium chosen to travel througout Europe is in the air. Flying is the quickest, easiest, and cheapest (sorry Eurail) way to move through Europe, thanks to the creation of low cost airlines, like Ryanair and easyJet.
However, with all of the interlinked airports and cities in Europe, it can be difficult to decide where to fly out of, and where to fly to. This is where the Low Cost Airline Guide (low-cost-airline-guide.com) comes into play.
The Low Cost Airline Guide is a simple, yet valuable site that allows its users to view where travelers can fly from a specific departure city. The site operates the same way Which budget does, but I think the low cost airline guide is much easier to use.
So for example, If I’m studying abroad in Oslo, Norway and I want to get away for a long weekend, the low cost airline guide tells me all of the destinations I can go to. One place of interest to me is Barcelona. Barcelona sounds nice, and the site tells me I can fly there with sterling.dk.
If you’re not a fan of the list view, there’s also a visual route map that can be used.
Low Cost Airline Guide is definitely nifty travel site that should be able to make anyone’s international budget travel bookmarks. Enjoy, and happy travels.
In my first two installments, I covered how Flyspy and Farecast are changing the online airfare booking scene. In Part 3, I’m exploring the benefits of using Farecompare.com
Farecompare allows users to view graphs of historical airfares between destinations They have a helpful “advanced graph” allowing you to see the historical data over a 7 day to 2 year period, while booking the tickets 0-30 days in advanced (advanced graph shown below). Their advanced graphing system also allows users to filter the airlines that are shown on the graphs to help those actually loyal to their air line carrier.
