Booking classes

Under the term of booking classes you will most probably imagine the three basic travel classes-economy, business and first class. But if you have a look at your air ticket you will find your class marked by one code letter. Exactly told this is not the travel class, but it is called the booking class. Now let's have a look, which classes we have.

Economy class is the most common one and has most codes as well. It's divided into three general groups. The cheapest fares, or so called Economy restricted are marked by following letters: G, K, L, O, Q, S, T, U, V, W, X. This fare will not usually allow you any changes of your flight, or a refund and you will also get less frequent flyer programme miles. Sometimes W and X are used for bonus tickets. M, H, N are called standard fares. These will allow you more flexibility, but may be limited as well. And finally the most expensive, full fare tickets in economy are marked Y, B.

In business class you may encounter five codes in total: C, J, D, I, Z. Here C and J marks the full fare business class and D, I and Z stands for some kind of discounted or limited business class. In that case you can expect, that your tickets will be non-refundable and unchangeable. It's the same as in economy.

First class is usually marked by letter F, but some airlines also use letter P. This P stands for Premium and is used to make difference between first class in two-class plane and the first class in three-class plane, which is then marked by P and should offer you even more comfort. As well as in business and in economy, first class has also a discounted fare. It's marked A.

And the last letter you may encounter on your air ticket is R. This was used for Supersonic, so if you flew on Concorde your booking class was R. But even though Concorde doesn't fly anymore, you may see this booking class. It was re-introduced with the arrival of A380 and stands for suite class, the most luxurious one.

So now you know, what does that magic letter on your air ticket mean. If you wish to know more about your travel class you will have to have a look at your airline website, because there are great differences between airlines.

About electronic tickets

These days you will usually get an electronic ticket when you take any flight, but not many years ago it was usual to fly on an usual paper ticket. Now let's have a look what are the advantages of this new kind of ticket and why it is better for you to travel using an electronic ticket.

In my opinion you will experience the biggest advantage even during your booking process, especially if you book your ticket on the internet. In the past you had to take a car and go to an agency to get your ticket printed, but these days you will receive you ticket via e-mail and you can print it at home. So as you can see it also saved you some time.

Once you book, your booking will get a booking code, usually 6 characters long like 3S1BQR. Using this code you may always review your booking at your airline website, or at the website of your reservation system. At most times www.checkmytrip.com should work for you just fine. This is the website of Amadeus reservation system, in my opinion the most common one. Should it not work you may also try www.virtuallythere.com for Sabre or www.viewtrip.com/ for Galileo GDS.

Once you go to the airport you just take your printed receipt and your passport or ID. It even should not be necessary to take the receipt with you, because they can find your ticket in the computer, but it's always better to have it with you any time you fly. At the airport go to your check-in desk and show your passport along with your receipt and you will get your boarding passes printed.

So you don't need to bring any paper ticket, only the receipt, but that is not absolutely necessary. You should be able to fly without that. Therefore your electronic ticket can't be lost, because it's always securely stored in your airline's computer and once you arrive at the airport they will find your ticket using your name.

Getting cheap air tickets

Have you ever wondered how to save even more while buying air tickets? Please don't expect any super secret informations, but I will give you few advises how to find the best deal and so safe many.

First step to get a cheap air ticket is to have a look to some air ticket finder. I can recommend you some websites for the beginning:

• http://www.skyscanner.net - A great website. This one features low cost as well
• http://matrix.itasoftware.com - Another great site, but this time without low cost

On these websites you will get some general idea about prices and available flight connections. My another step would be to open Wikipedia and to find a page with the airport I want fly to. Have a look which airlines are operating flights to your destination and then check their websites and see which price they can offer you. Though all those finder are really great tools I recommend you to check all possible airlines yourself. Sometimes you will be really surprised how great deals you couldn't see with using just skyscanner. When you have finally found your connection or flight it is finally time to start booking. If you have found your deal at any low cost airline website, then you can definitely book at their website, but you can't expect to get any ticket booked from a site like skyscanner. These sites are for finding you the connection, not for booking it. So you need another website to book your ticket. I think, that here you don't have much to loose. Just find a website which you like the most. I have only the best experience with Expedia, which I can recommend. Once you have your booking engine opened you have to specify the exact date, you have inserted into your search engine and if it's possible specify the preffered airline, which is the airline, that has offered you the best price. Then find the combination of flights you have selected at the finder and proceed to booking.