Long Haul travel with the family can be a very expensive exercise having just personally witnessed a friend fork out over $13K to travel return to the UK, that’s just for the flights! Planning your trip to get the best price can be crucial to the family travel budget. Making this job a little easier is the online tool called YAPTA.
If you are like me when it comes to planning the family overseas flights you probably tend to monitor the airlines websites and try and figure out when is the best time to purchase the tickets to get the maximum savings.
Thank fully there are some great online tools that can assist you in this process, we have just signed up to Yapta. Yapta an online flight search tool allows you to create a planned trip choosing from your preferred airlines of choice. The program the runs a query against the airline reservation systems nothing new there, and pulls back the best results online. However the real gem kicks in when it sends you notification that there has been a decrease or increase in the prices, allowing you to purchase when at the price you want. Another great thing about the tool is that when you purchase a ticket via YAPTA directly with the airline, you are then protected by the Guaranteed Airfare Rule and therefore may be eligible for travel vouchers or credits should your ticket price drop.
Devil in the detail
However we have discovered the devil is in the detail to maximise this benefit of the refund. If the price drops on an airline ticket you’ve already purchased, you may be eligible for a voucher or credit from the airline. Though you need to keep in mind that some airlines charge re-booking fees for purchasing on lower fares and making changes to tickets, there for you might not be able to receive a refund unless the price drop exceeds the re-booking fee.Yapta tracks the prices for you and does takes these re-booking fees into consideration so that you will be alerted only when the price drop exceeds that fee.
Fight the Devil
A way around this is to book flights with airlines that don’t push the re booking fees, these details can be found on the Yapta site.
Overall this is a great tool, and I can really see the benefit of using to monitor flights during the planning period for your family travel and vacations.
Check out the site www.yapta.com
Do you have any feedback or can recommend another site let us know in the comments below.
