Obsessively checking flights

Well, the most exciting thing going on in my life right now is my planned trip to the Dominican Republic in June. Thanks to my parents and their time-share, I'll be staying at an all-inclusive resort for the cost of $62/day. That's pretty cheap, right?

But the bad part is the freakin' airfare. It's ridiculous – in the $900 range for a decent flight – by decent I mean you could get there in one day. For a mere $674, I can catch a flight from Minneapolis to Newark, N.J., on Friday night, then languish in the Newark airport overnight before catching a flight to Punta Cana at 8 a.m. And on the return flight? It's the same deal – an overnight layover in Newark.

So I've been obsessively checking all the airline Web sites and the standard travel sites – cheaptickets, orbitz, expedia, etc. And I've concluded that all these sites basically suck. The only good Web site I've found is farecompare.com. It compiles the results from all the crappy sites so you can find out which ones have the cheapest flights. And it's pretty obvious that the cheapest sites to check out are the airlines' own Web sites.

But, it's still a crap-shoot. I'm holding my breath and hoping that the airfare to Punta Cana will drop sometime before June. Farecompare is indicating that that could be the case – but with my luck it'll probably skyrocket up to $1,000. That, unfortunately, would make the trip cost-prohibitive :(