July 17, 2009 — Recently I put a link to Expedia. com in the sidebar, with my recommendation. I’ll explain more fully here why you may want to use it.

I like it particularly  for examining the all-important layover times:

It seems that my flights to and from Guadalajara generally involve a stop en route. We did get lucky last year on a trip to San Francisco and got a mid-afternoon nonstop that got us into SFO early in the evening. Delicious! But on the way back, we had a change in LAX. Flying to Salt Lake City once took us through Las Vegas. Flying to Denver, we’ve changed in Phoenix and there are other choices too.

When you have a stopover like that, you need to allow plenty of time for it! And so you need to see the amount of times between flights. With Expedia, once you type in your two airports and the dates you want, you go to a list that shows you the flights, their prices, and the number of stopovers.

So I scroll down the list and pick a good-looking possibility. I click on “choose this flight” and then I can see exactly how long I will have between flights AND whether there is a terminal change you will have to walk or somehow navigate — with your luggage. (They do warn you that the terminal numbers might be changed themselves, but this clue is handy.)

For flying from GDL here in Mexico to anywhere I go in the US, I like to allow a minimum of two hours at that first airport. You need to get off the plane, get any checked luggage, go through customs, and find and get to where your outgoing plane is leaving from, going through TSA too of course. Plus a bathroom stop or two and maybe grabbing a snack.

I’m looking at a flight to San Francisco via Phoenix as I write this. Expedia tells me the times in the air for each leg, plus of course the starting and ending legs. I can see that I would have 2 hours and 19 minutes (did have to use my own brain cells to calculate that bit), so it would be an acceptable flight in my mind.

I’ve used other travel sites, but I do like this one. They and probably all such sites have stopped charging the surcharge on tickets ordered through them.

You can click through from the little Expedia logo on the sidebar, or here is another link to them, to a page where they give tips on green travel:

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