What does APEX stand for? Airlines have varying ranges of their lowest ticket prices and rules based on whether you're doing your booking 7 days out versus 14 or 21 or longer. "The acronym APEX," explains...
"The acronym APEX," explains Patricia Blanche, owner of La Cañada Flintridge Travel in La Cañada, California, "stands for Advance Purchase Excursion. The simplest way to explain this is that the airlines have varying ranges of their lowest ticket prices and rules based on whether you're doing your booking 7 days out versus 14 or 21 or longer. Once upon a time, there were promotional fares that were much lower if you were flying on weekdays versus weekends, staying for a specified minimum number of days, or whether your stay included a Saturday night. People tended to plan their vacations and business travel around those conditions because they knew they could save money rather than simply picking their dates first and automatically accepting whatever the cost happened to be."
"In addition," she continues, "APEX fares also meant that you were flying a single airline in the course of an entire trip rather than, for example, taking an American flight to your destination but making the return trip on Delta. Now, though, what we're seeing in this business is that they are mixing and matching carriers. What this means to consumers is that sometimes you can actually get a better fare if you take Airline A to Airline B to Miami through another city pair. In addition, instead of flying to a major airport, travelers are discovering that they can reduce their costs by flying to the next closest airport - for example, flying to Baltimore instead of Ronald Reagan or Dulles - and renting a car upon arrival.
"Here at our agency," she says, "we have all kinds of situations on the computer where we can pull up every fare in the United States just like you'd find if you went through Expedia or other online travel services. Let's say that you wanted to go from Los Angeles to Toronto. The computer will give you 350 different scenarios of what you can do. If, say, you want to fly at midnight and make two stops along the way, you can get there for around $250. If you want to take a more 'civilized' flight out at 9 in the morning and no stops at all, however, that fare may jump to $900 or higher."
"You have to be a very knowledgeable traveler anymore," Blanche points out, "because there's such an excess of information out there that you could literally spend days on the computer trying to find exactly the right fare that will suit your needs. Because the airlines are a business that is constantly in and out of bankruptcy, you need to realize that they're giving away as little as they possibly can. They're also extremely strict about enforcing the restrictions that govern whatever ticket you buy. Unlike the past where you could buy a ticket a couple of weeks in advance and then make all kinds of changes to it as the date got closer, today you need to know exactly what you're getting into. Your ticket is the functional equivalent of a contract: you're agreeing to abide by the airline's rules and the airline is agreeing to deliver you to where you want to go. Simply 'not knowing' what that contract represents is not an excuse that will hold water."
