If you've been buying tickets from the airlines or from normal travel agents, the odds are, you've been paying more than necessary. With the WWWanderer Cyberian Bucket Shop Guide, a telephone, and the willingness to shop around a bit, you can save hundreds, and even thousands of dollars on every flight you take. The WWWanderer scans its database of Bucket Shops and returns with a list of agents near you and a sampling of the fares they are presently offering. With this list, you can then call around to the different bucket shops to find out which one is offering the ticket most appropriate for your travel plans. However, in the United States, where the airline industry has been deregulated, quite a few good domestic deals can be found for flights between major U.S. metropolises.
Bucket shops are discount retail travel agencies.
For the most part, they focus on straightforward round-trip tickets for people who know exactly where they want to travel but are somewhat flexible about departure and return dates. Generally, the major airlines offer them seats that probably won't get filled by the normal full-fare paying business traveler. For this reason, most of the flights bucket shops have to offer are for departure dates no more than a few months in the future. They are invariably the best place to get last-minute flights that otherwise cost a fortune. They use these deals for their own retail customers, and frequently also sell to other bucket shops.