Oct. 22, 2007 issue

With long lines, late flights and lost luggage, airline travel is frustrating enough, and mainly out of your control. At least you can avoid overpaying for your ticket. Most airlines will issue refunds or travel vouchers to customers who buy tickets that later drop in price, and a new Web site makes it easy to track that. You can send your itinerary to yapta.com (which stands for “your amazing personal travel assistant”) and it will alert you when the prices drop. To get the refund, you have to contact the airline and change your tickets. Many airlines have change fees as high as $100, which can effectively negate the refund. But some are lower, and a few—United, JetBlue, Alaska Airlines—charge no change fees at all. You usually have to buy your tickets directly through the airline to get the refund.

If you really want to protect your price, especially for the upcoming holiday travel season, check your preferred routes at farecast.com. This Web site uses price histories to predict when prices on specific flights will fall or rise and tries to pinpoint the optimum time to purchase. You can jump when it says the time is right, buy your tickets and send your flight info to yapta.com, just in case the prediction was wrong.

—Linda Stern