Airlines are in Trouble

The airlines face the following challenges in that situation:

• Keep the flights full
• Avoid price wars
• Retain high service standards
• Reduce fuel consumption

Reducing fuel consumption demands a lot of investment spending to buy new planes and to improve fuel efficiency of older planes. And this in times of weakened banks and severe problems in the credit markets. All in all, this is not a time where you want to be an airline executive. But what does that mean for expats and people who have family relationships on more than one continent?

If you have family overseas and if you want to keep the relationships going, you cannot afford not to travel. On the other hand, you cannot hope that business travelers and tourists will fit the bill for higher costs alone, especially in times of slowing growth, low job security and high unemployment. But there are still good chances to find reasonable offers if you do some things right.

Stay Away from Peak Travel Days

Avoid high seasons like Christmas and summer vacations, if at all possible.
If you need to travel during high season, book early enough, but not too early. Most airlines have changed their rules, and they require now a payment and ticketing only almost immediately after a reservation is made. But if you book at the right time, you can still save several hundreds of Euros, especially compared to the prices of high-season-tickets a few days before the flight.
January and February are good months for buying summer vacation flight tickets, and for the Christmas season are February and March, or late summer good times to buy tickets.

Look Beyond Public Booking Engines

You should be aware, that for some destinations, especially in Africa and Asia, airlines create specials adapted to the needs of people visiting their relatives overseas. These special offers contain often better luggage allowances and some extra flexibility, e.g. the opportunity to rebook a flight after ticketing instead of a “no change, no refund” policy. Please be aware that those offers are typically not featured in public flight booking engines. Only selected travel agents receive special contracts from airlines to sell these tickets. The airlines do not pay commissions to their resellers. So the travel agent fee can undo the price advantage. But in this case you have still improved terms and someone who can assist you to change a flight if needed, while you are far away from the next airline branch office. So my advice is: Look for a travel agent who specializes in air tickets and whom you can trust, then build a long-term relationship with him.

If you are based in Germany, you may try as well our TailorMade TravelPlan

Same Plane, Different Prices
But in one aspect, there is no change: In the same plane, especially in economy class, there are on each flights passengers who paid for their ticket twice as much as the passenger with the cheapest flight ticket. So one and the same flight can be an expensive flight, and at the same time a cheap flight. The question is now: We just want to leave the expensive part of the plane to somebody else! What do we need to do so that these flights are for us cheap flights?

Time is the Key to Inexpensive Airfares
The main keyword to get the a cheap airfare is “time”. It is the time, when you make your flight reservation, the time when you buy your ticket, and the time, when you fly. If you buy your ticket too early, you may miss some specials. Airlines bring their specials into the market, when they have an idea of the market conditions. For example, now. September 2009, airlines publish their specials for the coming winter, the travel season after Christmas. It would have been a mistake to buy a ticket for a flight coming February already this May. This is especially true if you travel in low season months. On the other hand it is much easier to get cheap flights for February or November, than for August or December.
On the other hand, If you know you need to travel from December 22 to January 5, it is better to get a reservation as early as possible. This means in late January of beginning of February. For a cheap air ticket in the summer vacations you may start to look in November. But if possible, keep your reservation open, and do not buy a ticket until January. In January, after the end of the Christmas travel season, specials for the summer vacations are usually published.

Minimum Stay and Maximum Stay Important for Ticket Prices
The other important time feature of cheap flights is a stay over a weekend in your destination country, and the maximum time your ticket is valid.

Ethnic Fares
Air France and KLM demand for their Visit Friends and Family offers even a minimum stay of 2 weeks. Other airlines have similiar programs. Since it is in Europe problematic to use the nationality of passengers to decide who can get these fares, other features are used to define this market segment. The fares of theses programs are sometimes only slightly lower than normal fares, but sometimes there may be stark price difference. And, what is equally important, the fare rules are more relaxed. Generally, cheap air tickets are not refundable, and often no change of the ticket is possible in any way. Ethnic fares target families who have roots in two or more countries, especially in Europe and in Africa, Asia or Latin America.
Ethnic fares and their cousins, like fares for military service people, are not offered in booking engines.

Cheap is not Enough
This brings another consideration on the table: We are not really looking for cheap flights. We want flights with well maintained planes, with an airline which will be still around when we want to travel home again, on a way as direct as possible, and that for a low price.

Add Hidden Cost into the Picture
You need to add to the ticket price some hidden cost, which are often forgotten. We have developed Maximum Value for Your Airfare to help you find and evaluate these less than obvious expenses. It includes a checklist, asking the right questions, and while you fill your answers in, it does the math for you. This way it is a real timesaver in itself.

• If on the route the luggage for normal economy passengers is limited to 20 kgs, ethnic passengers will almost always be allowed to carry 30 kgs.
• the maximum stay for ethnic passengers is often extented. This means that a normal passenger can stay for a fare in a certain category e.g. 30 days, often an ethnic passenger can use a similiar fare for a stay of up to 90 days
• Often the fare rules for the cheapest tarifs forbid a change of reservation. In most instances ethnic fare will waive that restriction and allow a change of reservation against a fee.
• Sometimes ethnic fares are modestly lower than the comparable fares for the general public. But this is not always the case, the ethnic fares can even sometimes be a bit higher than the ceapest general fares.

These fares are offered by many carriers, but not for all destinations. Most common are ethnic offers from KLM/Air France and the Middle East Carriers like Emirates, Quatar Airlines and Gulf Air. Ethipopian Airlines and Thai Airways and Malaysian Airways offer ethnic specials as well. Commonly you can get ethnic specials to African countries and to South East Asian counties, like Indonesia and Thailand and Malaysia.

There are also ethnic fares to South America and the Caribic available. But on the transatlantic routes a luggage policy of 2 pieces each 23 kgs is common, especially if the flight is routed through the US. In this case one big ethnic fare benefit is gone, and so these fares are less common on west-bound flights.

Ethnic fares are exclusively sold in the area from there the flights originates. So a German travel agency can sell an ethnic fare from Germany to Africa, but not from France or the UK to Africa. Many carriers require special contracts for travel agents to sell ethnic fares. Agencies who do not have that agreements cannot sell these fares.

If you are a person who satisfies the conditions shown at the beginning of this post, you are welcome to inquire about ethnic fare available for your travel needs at

http://lounge.bestprice.travel/flights/ethnic.php