Ezekiel: coference 60mi N of Albany: Saratoga or the Sagamore on Lake George?

The conference is at the Sagamore, but the conference hotel sold out. I'll be staying 10 miles down the road at the Georgian, also in Lake George.

lastdan: have you checked 'jet blue'?

American Express / ITN offers JetBlue, Southwest, and I presume other discount airlines as part of its normal flight searches. The only airline that could possibly accomodate this entire itinerary is Delta, but they'd have me bouncing all over the place. The only sane way to cover all these cities is to use multiple carriers.

robricc: What day do you have to be in Albany? ... Maybe you can hitch a ride with me if the times match-up.

I arrive in Albany on Sunday, October 19. Then I'm renting a car and heading up to Lake George. I'll be there for the conference until Wednesday, October 22, then I'm on my way home. My hotel is ten miles from the conference (grrr), so I pretty much need to have my own rental car.

djc: what do you hate about orbitz, other than the offensive color scheme on their website?

I haven't used Orbitz in a while, so I went back and checked it out. The color scheme has definitely deteriorated since my last visit, but that's not what I hate. If you try doing anything even remotely complex with Orbitz, it's entirely incapable of finding reasonable fares. Example: I have a day trip to Ithaca coming up in November. Fly in Thursday night, fly home Friday night. AmEx/ITN found me a round-trip for $1700 (yikes!). Orbitz found cheaper fares that involved 3 or more stops (unacceptable), or $2400 for comparable one-stop round-trips. Strangely, Orbitz found a later-evening flight from Ithaca to Pittsburgh than AmEx/ITN did, but maybe there's no later connecting flight back home to Houston that evening.

The other thing I hate about Orbitz, even if you're doing a more normal itinerary, is their horrific N^2 display. If there are N outgoing flights, and N return flights, they'll show you all possible combinations. There's no way, that I could ever figure out, to have it just list the flights and let you make two separate choices.

Back before they closed their doors on September 11 (they were hurting well before then), my favorite online travel agent was BizTravel.com. Their flight search engine was significantly slower than their competition, but they could always find reasonable flights, even to obscure destinations. They also had a wonderful on time guarantee: if a flight on a "guaranteed" airline was late, they'd reimburse you some cash. It's fun when you're rooting for your plane to be late. Lastly, BizTravel had a preference form for car rentals where I wrote down "Japanese cars preferred" and it somehow always worked. Now-a-days, when I book directly with Hertz, there's nowhere to put in your own preferences like that.

But I digress...