Low cost airline tickets are what everybody wants. Nobody wants to pay more for an air ticket than they should. We all want the most value from our hard earned dollar, right?

In my book, "Why Not Fly Free: Untapped Strategies for Free Travel", I show how you can accumulate massive amounts of award miles for free travel. But there may be a time when you need to purchase an airline ticket. Certainly, a low cost airline ticket is what you want!

Not all booking engines are created equal

I need to explain something in detail here. Most of the booking engines online are directly connected to the airlines Central Reservation Systems (CRS), especially if its for domestic USA tickets.

What does that mean? The CRS are the RETAIL fares the airlines PUBLISH to the buying public. They are the highest rates. You won't find a low cost airline ticket here. I have a CRS in my office, AND I also have the database of wholesale fares too.

This is a little known secret most of the buying public knows nothing about. The true path to a low cost airline ticket.

For instance, the booking engine we use on our family of sites does not contain the airlines published retail fares. Rather it pulls from a database of more than 8 million wholesale fares. Also known as consolidator, bulk or contract fares.

These types of low cost airline tickets can be as much as 70% below the airlines published retail fares. Let me ask you a question, "Which fare would you rather purchase, wholesale or retail?"

Example of the difference between wholesale & retail

Recently, I searched for a fare from New York to Paris on Orbitz^™, one of the supposed leading low cost airline ticket web sites. The travel days were Thursday to Thursday in August ( low cost airline tickets are almost always found when you travel in both directions Monday thru Thursday ). Anyway, Orbitz^™ returned a fare of $862.00 plus the taxes. I then did a fare search on our site, same days & city pair to be fair, and our search yielded a fare of $719 plus taxes. A savings of $143!

Consolidator Fares vs. Retail Fares (Round Trip, Apr. '03)
Flight	Consolidators	Orbitz.com	Savings
NYC to London	$379	$544	$165
WAS to Paris	$458	$811	$353
MIA to Rio	$608	$789	$181
DFW to Frankfurt	$653	$760	$107
LAX to Hong Kong	$590	$718	$128
SFO to Beijing	$665	$873	$208

Also, not all consolidator fares are found online! Like I said, our database online contains 8 million consolidator fares to just about anywhere in the world. But we have other contracts that are not allowed by the rules of an airline to be put in the online database. And some of the time, those fares are LESS than those we offer online! That means that a low cost airline ticket can not always be found online.

Case in point: There's a wholesale contract we sell from everyday from a European airline that's not in our database online. For the same dates and season that the above example is $862, this fare is $596, an incredible savings of $266! Now that is a low cost airline ticket!

For our customer's convenience, our phone number is displayed on all our web sites (we have many) for all who would like to talk to an agent.

The trick to getting a truly low cost airline ticket is to find an agency that sells from the wholesale database. There are many but not all agencies do. So, be sure and ask if your really interested in a low cost airline ticket.

David Tinney, an expert in the travel industry, is the owner of Adventure Travel Service and author of the best selling e-guide, Why Not Fly Free. He received 43 international tickets free and shows you how to do the same.

Click here to get your Low Cost Airline Ticket
We compared several fares at online booking agents and found that AirlineConsolidator.com beats them all. Click above and see for yourself.

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