Last second flights have always been difficult to find. If you search for them on Google you may find there are almost 9 million results. 9 million! But if you appear closely at the outcome because search, you will discover that most of the results are from the exact same travel sites that report up for every travel inquiry. The reason being most travel websites draw on a single information from the same sources and many of those sources will not yield results if you need to leave in less then a week.

One of the ways around this problem is to look for a website that provides flights from a different source. One source are consolidators. You might have never heard about consolidators, but they are just companies that negotiate with airlines to purchase up seats that could otherwise not be sold, rather like a wholesaler. The consolidators agree to buy thousands of tickets annually that the airlines may not manage to sell and by doing so they get extremely favorable pricing that may be passed on to the end user, you.

Something you need to know about consolidator tickets, is they are never sold straight to the public. You can only get them from an authorized travel agency and not absolutely all travel agencies offer them. Some online travel agencies, offer them directly from their website on a first-come, first-served basis. What After all by that is that each and every itinerary has merely a very limited level of tickets available and when they are gone, they are gone.

The great thing about consolidator tickets is that there might be some available even although the airline shows them as sold out. The reason being the consolidator bought the tickets far in advance of them being offered to the general public. If the flight is out of stock, the consolidator can always involve some available for sale.

Many last second consolidator flights don't require any advance purchase or minimum stay and most tickets will soon be issued as E-Tickets. If the flights can be issued as E-Tickets, their is just a chance that you can find flights departing at the least 24 hours from enough time you look. If the tickets should be issued as paper, many flights may be booked at least 72 hours in advance. To be safe, I would recommend that you get your flights at least 5 days ahead of time to cover any unforeseen circumstances.

Another thing to take in to consideration is that when the departure city is located outside of the U.S., the consolidator may require as much as 7 days to process the tickets as they will have to confirm the charge card holders information.turna.com

Consolidator tickets do not have any special classification and are treated as some other ticket would be. Some of them may accrue air miles and most are upgradeable directly through the airline. To be safe, you may decide to contact the airline directly to see if the tickets can be upgraded or if they can be added to your air miles account.

As you will see, last minute flights can easily be around from an agency that specializes in consolidator tickets, it just usually takes a little bit of searching to get the flights that best suit your needs.