OK…it’s not the first time I’ve ever used Expedia, but its certainly been years since I have done so.  I might have mentioned that Mrs MJ on Travel and I have booked “back 2 back” eastern and western Caribbean cruises aboard Royal Caribbean’s most awesome Allure of the Seas in late October/early November.  I nabbed our flights down a while ago….as I just didn’t see things getting much cheaper than $90 dollars per person one way.  But the flights back have been pricing in the 200 dollar per person range.  I’ve been poking around, and while prices have come down, prices at the times we can actually return are still not what I’d call dirt cheap.

Nonetheless, I was sniffing around the other day and found US Airways’ 2pm nonstop back to DCA in the $150 range.  There does not appear to be an awful lot of seats sold, and prices could drop a little more, but I wanted it done.  And $150 one-way is in my reasonable range, so there.  I actually found a slightly cheaper Continental flight via Cleveland, but considering it could snow there in November 🙂 I went with the nonstop US Airways flight.

But back to my purpose here.  I was doing my searching on Expedia and intended to just go to usairways.com to book, but then I thought, why bother?  Expedia no longer charges a booking fee.  All of our necessary information to travel is already loaded on the site.  And better yet, Expedia will let you enter partner frequent flier numbers (since I’ll be crediting this flight to my United account).  The whole process took less than a minute.  I had our seats, and our confirmation in seconds, forwarded that email to TripIt, and our trip was all set.  Granted, I could have accomplished all of this on usairways.com, but I don’t have much in the way of information saved to my usairways.com profile so this did not take as much time.

All in all, I’d say I like Expedia’s booking interface.  It’s clean, simple, and quick.  I also like the fact that I could build a multiple airline itinerary pretty easily if I wanted to.  I don’t know if I’ll use Expedia for every booking, but this was easy enough that it makes me want to try it again for something a little more complicated.