Air travel fees, bumps and hassles

The best advice is basic common sense: Book as early as possible. And since your odds of getting bumped off a flight have increased, get to the airport early if you really need to get somewhere.

Try to book the very first flight of the morning. Reason being: There's a good chance that the aircraft assigned to your flight—as well as your flight crew—overnighted at your airport the night before. You therefore stand a better chance that the flight won't be delayed, or get stuck waiting for a crew.

Buy travel packages whenever possible. Tour operators often block space on flights that may not show as available on other Web sites or through the airlines themselves.

Though it sounds counterintuitive, avoid non-stop flights. They will be much more expensive, because the airlines will price them for business travelers who must fly somewhere quickly. Instead, book connecting flights that go through major hubs. Give yourself at least a two-hour connect time. If things go wrong, you have enough time to make arrangements, and you're already in a busy hub that offers a lot of options.

Track your flights using flightstats.com—not just immediately before you take your flight, but before you even make your reservation. Flightstats.com offers a great historical picture of the yearly on-time performance of every scheduled flight. Obviously, a flight that is late 96 percent of the time—and I’m sad to report there are a lot of them—is one you don't want to book in the first place.

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And finally, for a nice change of pace: For flights less than 400 miles, consider Amtrak or the bus. Both have become economically viable alternatives to flying. Just recently, I was traveling in upstate New York and needed to get back to Manhattan. I had a choice: a US Airways flight from Albany to La Guardia on an overpriced commuter flight with my knees shoved into my neck, into an airport that almost guaranteed to delay my flight ($460). Or I could go to the Rensaleer station in Albany, hop on Amtrak's Adirondack, a train that takes just over two hours on a beautiful route that hugs the Hudson River to New York's Penn Station. I had a seat bigger than most airlines' first-class seats, I could plug my laptop in and recharge my cell phone. And my fare was just $44. And as it turned out, while the US Airways flight was listed at just over an hour, my train actually beat it to New York by 22 minutes.

(That said, many tickets on Amtrak’s often rickety service between Boston and Washington, D.C. remain overpriced and do not represent the best price-quality ratio.)

Thanksgiving will once again be the most heavily traveled holiday of the year, and planes will be even more crowded—if that's at all possible. Fares are soaring. But the week after Thanksgiving has always been called the "dead" week in the travel industry, and this year will be no different. Fares drop significantly the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. If you can at all delay Thanksgiving by a week, you'll save hundreds of dollars.

Finally, how about some good news? With fewer flights in the air, hotels have more rooms to fill. According to farecast.com, hotel rates in Hawaii and Florida are down by 20 percent from last year. This was the first time since 2003 that occupancy rates have dropped, and similar drops are now happening in Palm Springs and Phoenix.

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