Supporting Air Service

[SkyWestOKC]

We all want air service to do better in OKC. Here's some ideas to make OKC more attractive.

• Join An Airline's Frequent-Flier Program
  These are free to join. Airline's often look at the number of members on their frequent flier list when adding air service. If you have the time and money, fly often enough to gain elite status. Airlines especially look at the number of elites in a city when adding service.
• Daytrips/Quick Trips
  Find a cheap or reasonable fare and fly for the day and come back home before dinner. Or maybe stay one night and come back. Adding passenger numbers to our stats.
• Pay A More-Expensive Fare
  Sort of contradictory to the above point. But, buying a more expensive fare makes a route more profitable, and more likely to stay in the system. For example, say you have $400 a person budgeted for your trip. You find an airfare on sale for $245, but the next highest fare might be $365. Buy the full fare since you already budgeted out $400. This is easier said than done, because it is YOUR money. I just booked a Frontier daytrip to Denver, cheapest flight with them was $70 each way. I payed $95 which was the next highest fare, and was within the budget I already intended to spend.

Just some things to think about.

If you like flying (the experience of actually flying i.e. airborne, the customer experience isn't all that great) then I recommend doing daytrips. I am doing about 2 daytrips per month on American, to gain AA Gold status (Elite). $39 fares to Dallas are very affordable, and since they are quick flights, they don't take up your entire day.

Again, food for thought!

[Kerry]

To build on what Skywest just said. Last minute travel for a lot of people is hard, but it doesn't have to be. If you know you want to take vacation starting on April 22nd, wait and buy your ticket on April 21 and go where there is a ticket available to go. You can save a bunch and take a trip to a place you might never consider going otherwise. My wife and I had some free trip vouchers that were about to expire. We tried using them for a year to go where we wanted to go but the airline never had anything available. With about 3 weeks left before they expired I called the airline and asked where we could go for the next week. We ended up going to Reno for a week.

If you are a Southwest fan try downloading Ding! They will send last-minute and special deal for your home airport right to you on your PC or iPhone. I don't know if they have an Android version yet.

[SkyWestOKC]

Last minute fares are often extremely pricey. If you are an American AAdvantage member, they have what's called weekend getaway fares. They come out a week before the flight date, and they are cheap fares (to get the planes filled). They might not be where you want to go, but a lot of times they are to Houston, Denver, Austin, etc. So a quick weekend trip for relatively cheap. I love travelling on a whim.

[Kerry]

Clark Howard has a section somewhere on his website for last minute fares out of the Atlanta area. Usually the flight leave in the next few hours but the discounts are huge.

http://www.clarkhoward.com/

If you were in Atlanta you could fly round trip next weekend to Miami for $157

When I did our last minute trip to "where ever" I had to call the airline directly. The agent could only look up three cities at a time so it took us a while to find a destination.