Johnny Jet’s summer travel advice: airfare, baggage andmore
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 .
Be flexible. You’re 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 orMonday 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 26miles away andusually 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 JohnWayne.
I go to Google Flightswhen I’mbooking 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.
If you fly a lot on a certain airline, then it’s definitely worth getting that airline credit card, because it will give you more miles, it will give you the perks, free bags, usually at least the first checked bag for free. But generally the airline credit cards are not such good deals. You want to get the other ones that let you transfer your points to multiple different airlines so you’re not just stuck with one, like the Chase Sapphire, American Express Platinum card, Barclaycard’s new Premier.
You need to really look at the fare class you’re taking because now even the big airlines likeAmericanandUnited andDelta are charging for carry-on bags on certainfares. They’re trying to competewith the low-fare carrierswho nowchargeup to$100 just tobring your bag on the plane and put it in the overhead bin. ... Look at the fine print and find out what’s allowed and what’s not allowed.
When you’re checking bags, look at Southwest because they do offer two free-check bags. Their airfares are not usually the cheapest but they could save you $120 round-trip if you’re checking two bags each trip.
I’d say, ‘Listen, I really strongly disagree. Can we ask your colleague or ask the pilot, just because I want tomake sure?’ And if you smile when you do that, you should be OK. But if you give them attitude, some of these guys are having really bad days and sometimes they’re just looking to kick people off.
AP deputy business editor Scott Mayerowitz contributed to this report
More tips from Johnny Jet at https://www.johnnyjet.com/ . Subscribe to the AP Travel podcast “Get Outta Here!” on iTunes