The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
Johnny Jet’s summer travel advice: airfare, baggage and more
Are you starting to think about summer vacation? John DiScala, better known as the air travel expert Johnny Jet , recently talked with The Associated Press travel podcast “Get Outta Here!” about strategies for booking flights, finding deals, coping with baggage restrictions and dealing with unreasonable demands from airline personnel.
Here are excerpts, edited for brevity and clarity. Listen to the entire interview with Johnny Jet at https://apnews.com/ afs:Content:1931200039 . not going to get a deal when everyone else wants to fly. I use Thanksgiving as an example: Everyone wants to leave the Wednesday before and return Sunday or Monday morning after. The airlines have no incentive to give you a deal. That goes for every holiday, every spring break. If you move up your plans by a day or two, you could save 40, sometimes even 50 percent.
Almost every major city has multiple airports. Everyone thinks when they’re going to South Florida they want to go to Miami. But look at Fort Lauderdale, it’s 26 miles away and usually a lot cheaper. You can even look at West Palm Beach (airport), which is another 40 miles away. If you’re coming out to California where I live, everyone looks at LAX, but there’s also Long Beach or Burbank or even John Wayne.
I go to Google Flights when I’m booking trips, and then I’ll go directly to the airline. But Google Flights doesn’t always have the cheapest. So let’s say if you want to fly Southwest, you have to go to Southwest.com because they don’t show up in these aggregators.
If you know what city you want to go to and the dates, you can have an alert sent when the price drops or if it’s going to increase. Google Flights does a really good job on that as well.