Now that I am going to be traveling from Asheville, NC to Juneau, AK on a fairly regular basis, I’ve been playing with several different options online for watching fares, sending me alerts for deals, and so on.

This has been my experience over the last couple months:

Twitter
Alaska Air and Delta Air both have Twitter accounts. I also use Travelocity fairly regularly, and they have a Twitter account as well. What a great way to keep up on the latest deals right?
Result?
Thanks to Alaska Air’s Twitter feed, I’ve learned a lot about the famous Olympic speed skater from Seattle. I’ve learned it’s Delta Airlines’ 80th anniversary of non-stop flight. I’ve watched a few people resolve some complaints, and I’ve even seen a few promotions for flights to Hawaii and stuff. But so far I have not seen any sort of financial incentives or flight deals that impact me directly. Mostly just a lot of chatter and clever quips.

RSS
Travelocity offers the ability to create customized RSS feeds that will only trigger when the cities and price point match my specific criteria. I wish Twitter did the same thing frankly. It’s something Dave Winer has been suggesting for awhile.
Result?
I set up my maximum amount of RSS notifications. But so far, I have not received ANY RSS notifications that matched any of my criteria. I only specified a slightly lower price point, but I have yet to be notified.

Newsletters:
I have subscribed to Orbitz, Kayak, and a couple other newsletters alerts. As I’ve asked different people about sites they use to get good deals I get recommendations of different travel sites, so I sign up in the hopes I can keep an eye out for more fare deals.
Result?
So far no good.

Admittedly, there are probably a couple things that make finding fare deals difficult for me.

• My home airport is a regional airport
  Asheville has a small regional airport. It kind of reminds me of the San Jose Airport. Well, San Jose circa 2003, since that is the last time I went through San Jose. Maybe it’s bigger now. So there aren’t a lot of people clamoring for an Asheville to Seattle flight, thus the scarcity of deals. My flights usually involve a shuttle plane from Asheville to Charlotte, or Atlanta, or some mid-west city like Chicago. Thus the added cost.
• TTL
  I have only been buying tickets a few weeks before my flight dates. As my work schedule solidifies and I can buy tickets months in advance, I think I’ll see a lot more flexibility in price.

Regardless, each flight is about 4500 miles each way. So my Frequent Flier miles are racking up. I’ll save my Frequent Flier Miles experiences for another post.

I’ve looked around online for more tips and tricks on finding flight deals. Usually I end up being pushed to a HubPages or Squidoo lens, or some lame Top 5 Airfare Tips blog post, which just end up trying to get me to click on an ad or affiliate link. Boo.

Does anyone have any tips on finding online deals? What has worked best for you?