Persistence for the Golden Ticket

This week we discovered some incredible flight deals out of Cleveland to various locations in the Caribbean. Islands like Grand Cayman (GCM), Antigua (ANU), Montego Bay (MBJ), Punta Cana (PUJ), and St. Lucia (UVF) for all less than $240 RT per person. What was even better was the flights were not only available for as soon as September of this year, but into next summer.

So I began to play around with the ITA Matrix system, out of curiosity, to see what I could fine on the cheap for next summer. Hour after hour, I continually saw that Grand Cayman was coming up the cheapest out of the islands listed. On various days into June and July 2015, the system was pulling up flights for $219 all in for roundtrip flights. What was better was that there were no long layovers on our particular option, as many of the really cheap days had overnight and exceptionally long layovers.

The problem was anytime I went to any other website to try and book at CLE – GCM trip, I could not duplicate the results. This included going directly to US Airways and American Airlines websites, as well as aggregate sites such as Kayak, Expedia, etc.

I was also desperately trying to see if I could get a cheap set of tickets booked with some US Airways miles or even US Bank points we had sitting out there. However, nothing could be duplicated along the same lines.

I studied the itinerary more closely, and ITA actually requested the flight segments be pieced together by a travel agent to get them to ticket. So I called up a travel agent to see what magic she could do, and really it went no where. Since commissions paid are so low on flights, she really put no effort into trying to get the flights to work, especially considering there were specific code share codes printed directly on my ITA reservation.

However, I was determined to find out why ITA was telling me there were $219 flights available, yet no other site could piece together the ticket with the same results. So I pulled up the AA website, and started piecing together the ticket segment by segment.

CLE to CLT

CLT to GCM

GCM to CLT

CLT to CLE

Tick, tick, tick as the system searches.

All of a sudden, the pieces started to come together. Segment by segment, the AA website was able to get the flights to process, but did you take a look at the above image? AA was pricing out the tickets at under $195 per person roundtrip from Cleveland to Grand Cayman. For those bad at math, that is over $24 cheaper than the ITA Matrix was finding tickets. INCREDIBLE!

So I quickly entered in all my credit card information, and miraculously, it went through. Now to wait for an email saying I was ticketed. Sure enough, about a half hour later I received our golden tickets.

For cheaper than our family typically flies across the United States, we will now be visiting the island of Grand Cayman next summer. This was an incredible deal that was able to come together as a result of thinking outside the box and piecing the segments together as opposed to performing just a simple search from A to Z.

Have you had better luck finding flights with this method?

Save Money, Travel More!

Source: InACents