Cheap Airfare Step 5: Find where the airfare deals are

The best deals, latest airline sales, and travel bargains delivered right to your e-mail—welcome to the wonderful world of airfare E-savers

The best way to get a great price on airfare is to know where the deals are. The good news is that you can get the latest air sales, travel deals, trip promotions, and vacation bargains delivered right to your inbox on a daily or weekly basis.

Best of all, they're free.

There are four main flavors: E-savers (last-minute bargains direct from the airlines), newsletters (roundups of deals and sales from many sources), fare alerts (be notified when the price of a plane ticket to Rome drops), and now Twitter feeds. We'll cover the E-savers here; the next two in the following two steps.

E-savers

Nothing scares an airline more than a half-empty plane, and they'll fill those remaining seats at the last minute no matter how slim the profit.

This is the only place in the travel industry where you can still reliably find those mythical "last-minute bargains"—which far too many people assume still exist in abundance, when in fact the airlines have gotten a lot better about matching their supply of seats to the demand there will be for them.

When, however, there still is an imbalance—too many seats, too few takers—the airlines send out last-minute "e-saver" emails.

Just about every airline, plus the major search engines (Orbitz, Expedia.com, Travelocity , Hotwire.com, etc.), will let you sign up for its own e-saver. These are weekly emails that offer you great deals for getaways, usually for the coming weekend (domestic) or week (international).

They're also frequently used to announce longer-range or system-wide sales of the "Spring sale on now!" variety, with a wider window of flying opportunity.

<< Setp 4: Opaque Airfares   ||   Step 6: Fare Alerts >>