China flights on the cheap

Being the cautious bloke that I am, I didn't want to book our flights until we got the paperwork from the university. I reasoned that if they went to the trouble to get us the necessary visa paperwork then they were probably serious. So once that came through, I went to book our flights.

Early on in my research I found out that Continental Airlines added a Newark-Beijing direct flight in 2005. Given that Newark is tremendously more convenient for us to get to than JFK, this was rather appealing. Unfortunately a trip to continental.com showed a One-Way ticket to be $1500 for one person. That was prohibitive and probably more than the school would reimburse us for. The other dilemma I had was finding an agent who was capable of booking the second leg of our flight from Beijing to Dalian on the same itinerary as the EWR-BJS trip.

After scouring various sources, I find this post on the ESL Cafe China section that has a lot of great flight resources. Basically the way the various sites on here can offer cut rate prices is the existence of "airline consolidators". Airline consolidators apparently buy bulk fares from the airlines and get a significant discount by doing so. Consolidator fares are harder to make changes to (it would cost $300) and impossible to cancel so they are not for the faint of heart but are good for our situation.

Using flychina.com, we were able to get a $634 per person for a one-way ticket from Newark to Beijing and Beijing to Dalian. Although I know we could have done even better, given that this was less than a month before the flight, I am pretty pleased. Flychina.com made me a bit nervous because you couldn't confirm everything online, you just submit your request and then they email a form that you print out and fax to them. All and all though it worked out very well - within an hour we had confirmed flights on Continental and China Southern.

Now if we can just survive the jet lag...