Opaque sites -- work sometime, but not always

On my current trip, I found that opaque sites often provide the best hotel and rental car prices, but not always. And no matter how often I travel, I almost always find some surprises. My trip involved a hectic different-place-every-night itinerary, so I had plenty of tries.

HOTELS. Boston was my first overnight hotel stop, and the opaque sites failed me completely. Hotwire's lowest price for any of the districts I could use started at more than $300 a night, and I had no intention of paying $300 a night for a hotel room in Boston.

For my Priceline bids, I started with the new site, www.thebiddingtraveler.com, which suggested a bid of $180 would likely be successful. But even when I bid up into the mid-$200s -- which would add up to more than $300 after taxes and fees -- those bids were all refused.

My guess is that something big was happening in Boston that night, because the opaque sites should have done much better. My fallback position? A prosaic AARP rate well under $200 at a hotel outside the districts I preferred but close enough to work.

For my stop near Charlotte airport, Priceline worked flawlessly, and I got a $95 a night room for $80. But Priceline didn't give me a good enough deal at my final stop, Warrenton Va., to offset the inflexibility, so I went with the measly 10 percent AARP discount. This time, Priceline scored on only one of three, and Hotwire didn't score at all. But that's not typical of my experience, which has generally been good with both.

RENTAL CARS. I needed two car rentals for this trip: for two days in Charlotte, picking up and returning at the airport, and for two days in the Washington area, picking up at Baltimore and returning to Dulles. For direct comparisons, I checked an intermediate size car -- with Avis, where prices were shown.

For the Charlotte rental, Priceline quoted $79 on its full-disclosure page, Avis quoted an AARP rate of $82, Hotwire's best opaque quote was $102, and the Avis no-discount price was $118. I tried a blind bid on Priceline that would have given a final price about $4 a night below its open price, which was refused. I finally went with the Avis AARP rate largely because of the superior liability coverage provided on the AARP program. But Priceline's open rate was very good.

For the Washington area rental, Hotwire quoted an opaque rate of $54, the AARP rate on Avis was $66, Priceline's open rate was $67, and the Avis no-discount rate was $73. Here, I went with Hotwire; Alamo provided the car.

Overall, I found several surprises in the car process:

-- Hotwire's high price in Charlotte was a puzzler -- about $20 higher than Avis/AARP and Priceline's full-disclosure price.

-- Also in Charlotte, when I tried the blind bid (unsuccessfully) on Priceline, its suggested bid price that stood a "very good chance" of acceptance was actually $4 a day higher than its full-disclosure price. Go figure that one.

-- The rental companies' CDW (collision damage waiver) charges are out of control. Avis wanted $27.99 a day -- a rate that was actually higher than the supposed pre-tax and pre-fee base rate.

-- New (to me) was the fact that Hotwire and Priceline now offer third-party primary collision coverage for $9 to $11 a day. I hadn't rented in more than two years and this one had eluded my attention. And it illuminates the degree to which the rental companies' CDW is inflated. You can bet that those third-party insurance companies are not losing money on their $9 to $11 coverage rates, so about two-thirds of the rental companies' daily CDW charges are pure gravy. No wonder they push it so hard.

For collision coverage, I still recommend relying on your credit card if you have one that offers the coverage, If not, the third-party coverages look a lot better than the rental companies' fat rates.

Send e-mail to Ed Perkins at eperkins@mind.net. Perkins' new book for small business and independent professionals, "Business Travel When It's Your Money," is now available through www.mybusinesstravel.com or www.amazon.com

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Alternative airports: Check always, use sometimes

Earlier this year, Milwaukee's General Mitchell International Airport conducted a survey of nearly 2,400 travelers and found that 48 percent of respondents flew through an alternative airport, only 19 percent of adult travelers who search airfares online always or often look at alternative airports, and more than half of U.S. travelers "are not taking advantage of fare savings by searching for alternative airports." Clearly, Mitchell Airport, an alternative airport to Chicago's O'Hare Airport, has a very specific ax to grind: The folks there want more travelers from Chicago's northern suburbs to fly through Mitchell instead of through O'Hare. But the survey has a wider application -- and in a wider set of circumstances.

Let's start by making sure we're on the same page about alternative airports. To me, an alternative airport is any field with commercial service other than the most obvious -- and usually proximate -- airport to your home or your destination. And you have several cases when you might want to consider such an airport at either end of your trip:

-- The main reason to consider an alternative airport is to find lower fares. This situation arises most often in cities that are "fortress hubs" for a giant line, such as Atlanta and Minneapolis for Delta, Houston for Continental, and Dallas-Ft. Worth for American. This is the centerpiece of Milwaukee's case: It claims that average fares from Milwaukee to common destinations are $108 less than at O'Hare and $17 less than at Midway.

-- The opportunity to find lower fares at alternative airports is especially attractive where a really small regional airport has service from a low-fare airline that specializes in small-city deals. In the case of Chicago, however, you wouldn't always go to Milwaukee; instead, you might go to Rockford, where Allegiant and Direct Air offer less-than-daily flights to a handful of the nation's top tourist destinations at very low fares.

-- Parking often costs less at alternative airports than at the giant hubs. Again, Milwaukee claims its rates for comparable parking are less than half the rates at O'Hare.

-- Security, access to rental cars, and other processing factors are usually easier and less stressful at smaller airports than at giant hubs.

On the other hand, if you live in or head for a small community with limited air service, you may want to use a more distant large airport with better service and lower fares. I know from that case: Fares at my home airport, Medford, Ore., can be very high to/from cities not linked by a line such as Allegiant. I find, for example, that maybe half of the travelers I know who live here often drive to Portland or Sacramento airports -- about 300 miles either way -- to find better and cheaper air service.

When you consider an alternative airport, you have to factor in the access. Often, a more distant alternative airport will have little or no convenient public transportation to/from an adjacent big city. If you don't drive, you have a problem. From Milwaukee, for example, the public transit to Chicago is on Amtrak, with seven daily trains that run two to three hours apart, and there is no good public transportation at Rockford. You find the same problem at other potentially attractive fields, too; Islip (Long Island) is a long shuttle-plus-train schlep into Penn Station and there is no good public transportation between Steward Field and New York City.

Be especially careful in Europe: Some big low-cost airlines use fields far from the city they're supposed to serve. Ryanair's German base at "Frankfurt-Hahn," for example, is actually 75 miles from Frankfurt, with no direct rail service, and its "Paris" airport at Beauvais is 50 miles from Paris, also with poor access.

As long as you're careful to avoid local airport access problems, I concur with Milwaukee's overall recommendation: Check alternative airports. Most of the big online travel agencies offer you an easy option. Just click on that "search alternative airports" box -- it costs you nothing -- and you can sometimes knock your air travel bill down significantly.

Send e-mail to Ed Perkins at eperkins@mind.net. Perkins' new book for small business and independent professionals, "Business Travel When It's Your Money," is now available through www.mybusinesstravel.com or www.amazon.com

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