travelocity unblacklisted

traveling is tough. i'm making reservations for flying to boston on may 25, basically my birthday but mainly for liza's wedding. it's about two months away, but because it's memorial day weekend the prices are already averaging over $400.

i made a sacrifice and will be taking tuesday morning off so that i can fly back from boston on the redeye at 6 am. i can still get some shuteye, i think.

however, getting a ticket has been hell. trying to use rewards miles is worthless, because no airline will give you a flight you want - friday evening to monday evening, which is probably what everyone wants to fly without missing work. i was even (probably stupidly) willing to fly two redeye overnight flights. but without that, kayak.com and expedia.com could only get me these bogus northwestern flights that didn't really exist, and expedia kept telling me that the price of a ticket has gone up since i last clicked OK.

that's when i switched to internet explorer, because of something i heard about airlines putting cookies on your computer. i also switched to travelocity because, even though their outsourced customer service sucks ass, i knew i wasn't getting any better on anywhere else, even kayak. =(

so it takes a good reservation on an airline on which i have many points already to make me take more than a second's worth of look at travelocity. but what really got me happy was the phrase "Lucky Day! We found an even LOWER price for your flight!" and i looked and saw that the price was $376 after taxes, where i'd been expecting $415 after taxes if i was lucky. Lucky day!

i guess maybe i got lucky this time. probably they're screwing me still because i'm paying like $70 for taxes and i've seen that value fluctuate from $30 to $70 for no apparent reason. but i doublechecked my schedule this time and i didn't get any unseen 12 hour waits at the airport, and even the return flight is direct from boston to san diego. so at least this time i feel decent about purchasing the ticket.

so recently i've spent:

$468 for nationals ticket
$268 for portland
$381 for boston

= >$1100 for travel from March 30 - May 30. I need to win the lottery.