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Let’s Play “Just The Tip!”
or “Cletus’ Airline Travel Tips for Skiers”
Welcome to Grandpa Cletus’ list of key travel tips for the airline supported adventure. After a quarter century of travel to destinations across the globe, and the last five years of frequent storm chasing across the US, I’ve accumulated the following “best practices” designed to maximize my chances of scoring the goods upon my arrival via common carrier airline. I think of this list as my box of rubbers; if you’re flying into the unknown, you will probably need at least one, and if you’re going somewhere particularly adventurous, you might need to double up.
Please note, most of my time has been spent flying on United domestically and American internationally. Regulations do vary by airline and change over time, and I’m obviously not responsible for any bullshit you have to put up with because you were too lazy to do a little fact checking. Basically, it’s your own damn fault if you “take my tip” and get screwed. Ha. After all, you were asking for it. I can tell by the way you were dressed; those calf high boots told me everything I needed to know.
That being said, I’ll try to keep this list fairly current as it pertains to rules and regulations, and these really are what I use to “get in there and get off.” Also, I’m sure many of you will want to “stick your tip in” too, so please feel free to take sloppy seconds after I’ve blown my load (it may take me a while to finish). So, where to begin? There are just so many places I want to put my tip in. I guess we’ll start with…
1. The Ticket
If you’re traveling by air, the key thing to understand is that you’re going to be trading off time, cost, and flexibility. Go ahead and work the system, but don’t hate the game, it won’t do you any good; this is the nature of air travel. With one key exception, it works like this:
Doing It Cheap
If you have leeway on your front and back end timing, you can always find cheap tickets…however, it means you’ll generally end up locked into a hard-to-change, non-refundable, inflexible itinerary. This can cause serious complications and stress when the snow or schedule doesn’t line up the way you’d like, and is compounded significantly by international travel, as airline customer service is usually harder to contact outside your home country. If you have to go this route, set your expectations appropriately. When I go on the cheap, I usually use Travelocity – they have pretty capable service agents – but I know plenty of people that have had good success on the cost side with Orbitz and Expedia. If money is your single biggest concern, be prepared to do fare searches every week for the four months before your trip – airline ticket pricing is based on yield management techniques, and prices will jump all over as various utilization levels are hit.
A couple of extras when it comes to tickets purchased through a discount channel. First, even though the ticket is purchased through the discounter, with a bit of status, luck, and/or charm, you can sometimes deal directly with the servicing airline if you need changes made, and thereby avoid the discounter’s additional change fee. Rare, but possible, and definitely worth a shot if you have the patience and requisite status, luck, and/or charm. Travelocity charges an extra $30 on top of the airlines’ basic change fee (usually $100 these days), which is on top of any fare difference, so it’s not just monopoly money. In some countries, $30 is an entire day of skiing, eating, and drinking. Or whoring. Whatever.
Second, when you cancel a ticket purchased through a discounter, the reverse applies – you have to deal with them, and they hold the credit. Furthermore, the discounters don’t bother to hold much information around, so they won’t be able to find your credit if you can’t give them the original ticket number. Note, this is not the airline assigned reservation number, such as UA-FUX4YU. It is a long (9 digit?) numeric string in most cases. If you cancel a ticket purchased through a discounter, make SURE to keep your records so you can use the credit at a later date (usually up to a year later).
Being Limber
Now, if you can afford it, you can buy a fuller fare or open-ended ticket, which allows for fairly easy changes and line-of-scrimmage audibles. When there’s a high degree of uncertainty about scheduling, timing, and snowfall, this is often the right route to go, even from a total cost perspective. Buying the cheap ticket early on and then having a tough time changing it and paying through the nose to do so when you need to later may actually cost you more than simply paying for a more flexible fare in the first place. It sucks to pay a lot, but don’t hate the player – hate the game. Wait, didn’t I tell you not to hate the game? Ha, sorry, sometimes my shit stinks too. Unfortunately, if you have limited flexibility, you’re going to pay more; if you also have limited funds, you have to live with whatever you get, and like it. My rule of thumb: be prepared to take it in the ass about once out of every fifth booking that you try to do things on the cheap with no slack in your schedule.
The Best of Both Worlds
The one exception to this annoying cost-schedule conundrum is found in the magic of frequent flier miles. With even just a little bit of scheduling leeway to work with and some early planning, this is absolutely the way to go when it comes to air-based storm chasing. First of all, it’s fairly difficult to be cheaper than free. Second (and equally important), most airlines allot a certain number of frequent flier seats for each flight, and as long as you’re not changing origin or destination, allow for as many date changes to both departure and return as your addicted little heart desires once the ticket is booked. This means that when the storm rolls in late and buries everything tits deep on your departure day you’re still riding the lifts instead of crying quietly in seat 22B, waiting for the plane to be de-iced for the third time while the clock runs out on your crew’s available flight hours and eventually strands you at the airport that night. My mantra: frequent flier miles = free and flexible flights. Yahtzee!
So, what if you don’t have any frequent flier miles? First, other people can gift frequent flier miles into your account, up to around 20k per year (I’ll have to re-check that figure). You don’t have an account? Well, you’re an idiot, but I can’t help you with that right now; in the meantime, other people can use their miles to buy a ticket for you. Do note, although mileage reservations can be made over the phone, when using miles to ticket in someone else’s name the miles owner will have to sign in person at a ticket office i.e. airport for actual ticketing to occur. What if you (or they) don’t have enough miles for a ticket? Turns out you can even buy miles to top off an account. One word of wisdom: buying or gifting miles takes around five to seven business days to happen, and you can’t complete the ticketing until you actually have the miles in the account. So, how many miles do you need? Domestic travel is usually around the 25k mile range, and international travel is around the 50k range. Some airlines are lower.
Time to Fly
Finally, a couple last thoughts on timing. First the basics. Airlines usually have price breaks at a 21-day advance purchase and 14-day advance purchase, and sometimes have price breaks at seven days and three days. Many people also know there is often a price break on a trip that has a Saturday night stay over included. Here are a couple other slightly less obvious tips: Monday AM, Thursday PM, and Friday PM are peak business travel times, so don’t plan to fly then (more expensive, more crowded, more everything). In particular, 7:00a to 9:30a, and 3:30p to 6:00p are bad like Michael Jackson. (Oh and by the way, while I'm thinking about timing and flight details...keep in mind that your odds of success are negatively correlated with the number of connections you have to make. Every time you change planes, the chances that either you or your bags will miss your connection go up exponentially. You'll pay more for non-stop flights, but you'll at least show up with your gear.) And finally, don’t ever plan a trip to a foreign country which has you arriving on a Sunday; everything is that much more likely to be closed when you arrive bleary-eyed and hungover. But more on how to fly in comfort later.
Message In a Bottle
So, what’s the one big take-away here? In my opinion, it’s that the flexibility of the airline ticketing arrangement is a highly overlooked and undervalued reality of airline-supported storm chasing. If you have no choice, you have no choice...but if you have some leeway, your goal when purchasing a flight is to maximize your travel flexibility at a non-prohibitive cost.
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