Finding Discount Airfare to Shanghai from US

Airfare to Shanghai from the US is higher this summer than I remember it to be in the past.  I usually just use the usual Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) like Expedia and Orbitz, and the flight metasearch sites like Kayak, and I’m able to find an acceptable fare.  I’m basically fine with paying about $900-$1000 from SFO-PVG, even if I have to take a connection.  Because I’m a United Airlines mileage whore loyalty program member, I’m willing to pay a little more to fly a Star Alliance flight that gives me the miles and even more importantly, the Elite Qualifying Miles (EQM) that give me a chance at being treated like a human being elite status on United.

But this summer has been different.  Fares seem to be floating around $1400+ round trip from SFO-PVG-SFO and I’m just not willing to pay that much.  So the high air ticket prices has forced me to shop a whole lot harder to find a deal.  I thought I’d share some of my favorite sites and tools here.  What other sites or travel agencies would you recommend to find cheap flights or discount tickets to Shanghai for the Shanghai Expo?

1.  FlyChina.com

The first site I want to highlight is FlyChina.com.  They have a nice low fare navigator that shows the lowest possible fare for some major origin cities and China destinations:

You can click on the origin city or the destination city, or the price to get more details.  The best feature of FlyChina is the Best Fares Other People Found for My City.  You can get a sense of the lowest possible fares around a certain time to give you a sense of how good the fare is that you have found:

Each of the months can be clicked on to reveal all the fares that people have found around this time.  As you can see, there are a few carriers that tend to have the cheap prices:  Korean Air, Air Canada, Asiana.   Kayak Buzz has a similar feature but I think FlyChina has lower fares than Kayak, and the tool is less well designed for just looking for China destinations.

2.  CheapOAir

I have shopped CheapOAir a couple times and have gotten access to some good deals on United and Air Canada, most recently.  It is a typical Online Travel Agency that has some consolidator fares.  There are lots of other sites with similar names:  CheapTickets, CheapFlights, CheapAir…Some of these sites are just intermediaries directing you to other sites for booking tickets.  It looks like CheapAir has some low fares on Japan Airlines, but I don’t have any real experience with this booking agency.

I got a very good deal on CheapOAir on a Air Canada routing through YVR (Vancouver) but it requires a 14 hour overnight layover on the way out there.  I ended up booking a $100 hotel room for the overnight stay near YVR in order to save about $1000 for 2 tickets.

I have also read complaints online about some of these Air Canada tickets.  A connection in Canada requires a transit visa for Chinese passport holders (and probably other countries as well).  For US passport holders no visa is required.  Unlike Tokyo (NRT), Seoul/Incheon (ICN), or Hong Kong (HKG), YVR is really not set up with a transit terminal that allows transit passengers to avoid going through immigration formalities for just a transfer.

3.  Vayama

I’ve heard some good things about Vayama. Vayama is another OTA that sells you tickets directly, and apparently has some “opaque” fares tied to the various mileage alliances (like Star Alliance, or SkyTeam) according to Tnooz.

4.  Hawaii Aloha Vacations

I’m friends with Bruce and Yaling Fisher who have a Hawaii travel agency specializing in discount Hawaii vacations in Honolulu.  I’ve checked fares with Yaling and found that they have some contract rates through Delta Airlines (formerly Northwest Airlines) connecting through Narita.  The tickets were about $1300 and a little less expensive than what I found generally on the Web.  Delta has a good HNL-NRT-PVG or PEK option that also allows for open jaw travel (e.g. SFO-PVG outbound, then PEK-SFO return).  I’m sure other people also have the same fare but I know Bruce and Yaling personally and trust them.  Bruce is @AlohaBruce on Twitter and Yaling is @AlohaYaling.

5.  Chinatown travel agencies

I’ve also booked tickets through local SF Chinatown agencies before in the past.  Active Travel & Tours has helped me out in the past.  Eliza Lau communicates in English, Mandarin, or Cantonese and mostly likes to communicate through email.  Their phone number is 415-397-3278 and email is activetravel8 at yahoo.com.  I have gotten some cheap tickets from them in the past, usually on Air China.  But they also have access to some discounted Cathay Pacific flights as well.  This summer, Air China is extremely expensive if you want to book far ahead of time and I think there are only deals to be had on Cathay Pacific.  However, I think as your travel date approaches, I would expect there to be some cheaper tickets on Air China because I bet they are expecting a lot of demand and that demand may not actually be there in the end.

6.  Fly.com and Kayak

Fly.com is a new travel metasearch site that is essentially the same as Kayak.  It crawls all the other OTAs and pulls airfare information from them. You click through to those other sites to actually book your travel.  In some cases the sites are the actual airline supplier sites.  Fly.com also has a nice calendar view that shows you the lowest prices for all the dates in a month:

Kayak is worth checking as well.

7.  ITA Software

Still reading this post?  If you’re a data junkie like me, you’ll want to check out ITA Software as well.  Turns out that Kayak, Bing Farecast, and many of the other flight metasearch Websites are actually powered by another company called ITA Software.  ITA Software has its own “demo” website called QPX Matrix and QPX Matrix 2 which is essentially a power-user data-geek interface to the same kind of information you can get on Kayak.  But I like it better than Kayak because it gives you lots of geeky search controls.  You actually have to set up an account (free) to get access and then you can’t actually book the ticket on ITA Software, you have to go to Expedia or some other OTA to actually book.  Here are some examples of what I like about ITA:

Choose flights (graphical)

ITA has a geeky option called Graphical that shows bars that depict when flights leave, length and location of layover, when flights arrive, and color code all the bars by airline:

Matrix 2

They also have a nice tool called Matrix 2.  When you are about to do a search using the regular QPX search, look to the right and see this:

This tool is good when you have departure date flexibility and also can stay various lengths of stay.  You basically decide which month you want to look at, and approximately how long you want to stay.

What you get back is a grid with the lowest prices by departure date.  You can uncheck airlines that you don’t want to take.  For example, I found that many of the lowest fares were on Philippines Airlines, and I wanted to remove that because I know that routing through Manila is a really long itinerary.

You can see how this might help you find a sweet spot.  Also, you should try this out with various lengths of stay.  This is because some airlines don’t fly everyday, and you might have chosen a length of stay which accidentally has a return or a departure that doesn’t have a flight on that airline.

For example, Asiana Airlines only flies from SFO-ICN on Tue, Wed, Fri, and Sun on its own equipment.  It has code-shared flights that are on United Airlines equipment but I have found those fares to be more expensive.  Asiana Airlines also flies back from ICN-SFO on Tue, Wed, Fri, and Sun.  So to get the best fares on Asiana, you need to select a departure and return date on those actual days of the week.

8. UPDATE:  Hainan Airlines

Stacy Small (@EliteTravelGal) suggested I get in touch with Joel Chusid (@JoelChusid, @HainanAirlines) to see if Hainan had some good deals on their SEA-PEK flights.  Here’s how he responded:

Nice for Stacy to introduce us. We have some great Business Class fares for the summer from Seattle as well as from points in the US in conjunction with AS, AA and CO. As Mainland China’s only 4 star Skytrax-rated airline, people go out of the way to fly us. Using Seattle is not backtracking from the Western US and the connections are pretty good and allow people to use satellite airports like Burbank, Orange County, San Jose, Oakland, etc. and avoid LAX and SFO. Our flights operate to Beijing Mon, Wed, Fri and Sat and we have an immediate connection to Shanghai’s HongQiao airport, the one closer to downtown. The new terminal there just opened.  So it’s 2 segments from Seattle (but there is no nonstop service ) to Shanghai, and 3 from other points. Our business class features a free stopover in Beijing, if desired, fully flat seats with a massaging feature, gourmet cuisine, 110 channels of MVOD, and a crew whose smiles are genuine.

We do have economy class deals as well, but to be honest, we’re pretty sold out through July and what’s available are high season fares (especially to Shanghai), although some bargains can be had departing in August and beyond. They also feature the MVOD and easy connections.

9.  UPDATE:  Sharp Travel (via China Law Blog)

…

I am a big Asiana Airlines fan because it is in the Star Alliance, because it has relatively new planes and an excellent safety record, and because it has such an incredible network of Asian (and Chinese) cities to which it flies. I also like stopping off in Seoul, which has one of the two or three best airports in the world, which includes a quite decent and well-priced in-airport hotel and very nice Hyatt a five minute free shuttle away and a very new Sheraton a little bit further out in Incheon.

Anyway, I hope some of you readers have other tips to finding cheap flights from the US to Shanghai for the Shanghai Expo!