If you book online through a booking engine or call a travel agency, you have a good chance of getting a good buy.

Where and how you buy your ticket can greatly affect the price you pay.

Travel agencies are the closest you will get to unbiased information on an airline ticket. However, you cannot call just any travel office. If you're flying internationally, you'll need to contact one that sells consolidator tickets, otherwise you'll be paying retail.

If you're flying domestically, there are several websites that sell domestic airline tickets discounted below the airlines published retail fares. Just to mention a few: Hotwire, Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity. When these sites first appeared, they were selling retail fares. From what I can see now, they have negotiated contracts with certain airlines for discounts on many routes, but not all.

But you have to be careful, I have also seen times when fares on these sites are higher than what the airlines publish in the Central Reservation System (CRS). You ALWAYS need to check several sources before you purchase.

We sell some domestic airline tickets in our office, but the vast majority of our business is international airline tickets. In times past, I have seen the fares in our CRS lower than what people who have called us have found online or from the airline. The only explanation I have is that our system, which is called Amadeus and owned by Lufthansa, Air France and others, prices flights a little different than other systems.

There are some consolidated fares on certain airlines on what we call long haul flights, like East coast to West coast and a few other major cities in between. But if you're looking for a discounted ticket between Des Moines Iowa and Little Rock Arkansas, they just aren't there.

Recently, I searched for a fare from New York to Paris on Orbitz^™, one of the supposed leading low fare web sites. The travel days were Thursday to Thursday in August (lower fares 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!

The fare from Orbitz^™ is a retail fare. You can get the same fare if you called the airline yourself. But the fare from our booking engine, which was less, is a consolidator fare. Big difference.

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!

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. Write this number down, (800)488-7901, you can call us if you cannot find a fare.

So, using one of these two ways will allow you to buy the least expensive airline tickets: One, is to find a travel agency that sells wholesale (consolidator) fares or Two, when booking online to be sure the booking engine you are using contains consolidator fares.