Tools and Tips for Air Travel

This entry is part 6 of 11 in the series Travel Tools & Tips for Planning, Scheduling, Recording & Commemorating Your Trips

Tools and Tips for Air Travel – in this post, I’ll give you some tips for booking air travel which I’ve learned from traveling by plane for the past several decades.

To book flights, I start looking at the calendar of fares for the general time of year we’re thinking of going. For example, I go to Google’s Travel site and start looking for flights. I do this mid-week as prices seem to be better then. Unless I have a strict schedule, I look at the fare calendar to see if adding or subtracting a day or days may be beneficial to get a lower fare. One problem is that not all airlines have all their flights showing in Google Flights. In this case, you can go to an individual airline’s website and compare manually. Here are some airline/flight-specific things to consider:

• I rarely use American Airlines because their hub is in Dallas Fort Worth. I’ve almost never had an incident-free flight that transfers via DFW. I’ve been stuck on the tarmac for hours, multiple times.
• I will only schedule a flight with United if I have no other options. This may be a somewhat regional issue. They may be fine elsewhere. But flying out of Sacramento on United means stopping through San Francisco (SFO), usually. So many times, the flights in the morning are canceled or delayed due to fog or some other weather- or maintenance-related issue.
• For international flights, I like using Delta because their hub is in Atlanta. And going through Atlanta, especially on the return is advantageous because Atlanta’s Customs are designed to accommodate the traffic. Whereas, going through JFK, is a nightmare! Miami is less of a mess than JFK but involves a lot more walking to transfer your luggage.
• For flights to Hawaii, I use Hawaiian Airlines. They’re the best for going to and from Hawaii and have some great deals. If you sign up for their frequent flyer program, you’ll be notified when there’s a deal going on. As I was writing this, I got one of their deal notifications, and I think we’ll be going on a scuba vacation in a couple of months! Update: 4/15/2023 – I rescind that they’re simply the best. On the way to Oahu, our entire row of seats did not have entertainment. We could see the safety videos but that was it. On the way back, three of the four bathrooms in our cabin were out of order. They now fall below American Airlines. Update: 1/29/2024 – While traveling in our RV from Oregon to Northern California, we stopped at a Harvest host location outside Medford called Historic Vineyard and Tasting Room.
  • While we were waiting for our charcuterie board to arrive, we were chatting with another couple who stopped for the night to camp too. The man is a pilot for Hawaiian Airlines and flies out of Portland. So he gave us some backstory on our flight when we explained how terrible the last flight we’d taken had been. Turns out the plane we were on was the plane that encountered severe turbulence that resulted in people hitting their heads on the ceiling of the plane three months before we’d flown. Hawaiian Airlines decided not to take the aircraft out of service because that would mean canceling flights, but three of the bathrooms were affected by the impacts of the turbulence on the plane. So those couldn’t be used safely. I wish they’d given us the choice of whether to fly that plane or not.
  • But since Hawaiian Airlines has now merged with Alaska Airlines, we have hope for improvements in operations. Boeing’s issue with parts aside, our most recent experience flying to and from Seattle for a Seahawk’s game confirmed our impressions that Alaska does invest in new planes and technology.
• If we’re going somewhere we need to transport wine (yes, this is a need), we like to use Alaska Airlines because they allow you free checked wine out of California. Flying somewhere that it’s difficult to import California wine into makes this a necessity. In October we visited long-time friends from California who now live in Arkansas. When I asked, “Should we bring wine”? They said, “Up to you, but YES”! Unfortunately, we were flying Southwest who repacked all of it for us. And in doing so their transportation services destroyed one of the bottles. Grrrr. Sometimes it’s advantageous to ship the wine ahead of time if the destination state allows it.
  • If you do use Southwest, one of their hubs is in Denver. If you book your flight to go through Denver later in the day, and your schedule is fluid, you have a pretty good chance of earning Southwest money because a fair number of flights require them to bump passengers. Also, hey, they just resumed alcohol service and are issuing drink tickets again. Woot-woot.
  • If we’re going on a scuba dive trip, I like to use Southwest because of the two free checked bags. We always have an extra bag each for dive equipment, so the checked bag allowance is awesome.
  • One other caveat about Alaska is that they just revised their credit card annual fee to $95. It used to be $75, and they give you two free checked bags (and checked bags for up to six people traveling with you) plus one free one-way companion ticket per year, which equates to $99. If you live near one of Alaska’s hubs, joining their loyalty program is worthwhile. If not and you want to fly them all the time, you’ll have to stop at one of their hubs.
• A word about the super-discount airlines: Allegiant Airlines – this airline is great, but it’s definitely no frills. We have family in Eugene, and we can fly out of Oakland straight to Eugene pretty cheaply. With gas prices, it beats driving! We’ve flown to Las Vegas from Stockton too, and all went well. We’ve also flown out of Sacramento to Las Vegas on Frontier, and no issues there either. But I would not book anything on Spirit. They stranded our daughter in Florida with little communication and lots of issues getting back on track.
• And a word about what travel programs (meaning TSA Pre-Check, Global Entry, CLEAR, etc.) you should join if you plan to travel regularly. There are many options, so I wrote a separate post about the differences and advantages of each.
• If you can easily get to nearby airports, definitely pick the option to search nearby airports when searching for flights. For us, we can easily take the train to San Francisco or Oakland and park at the Sacramento train station or Uber/Lyft to and from the train station. Super helpful if you’re going to be gone for more than a month.
• For booking international short flights, e.g., those between or within countries where it’s the best option for going from one place to another, I use Skyscanner.com. It’s kind of like Google Flights because it searches the airlines that serve the route you want and pulls back the best options.

After writing all of this, I decided to check to see if there was some research-based guidance on the best (most reliable) airlines. Current guidance is based on flight info that occurred during the first half of 2022. (I’m sure after it’s updated with the second half of 2022, Southwest will be at the bottom). But, to summarize the article, Hawaiian is number 1, Alaska is number 2 and Frontier is number 3. You can see all the categories they rated each airline on by going to the article.