Orbitz doesn’t have William Shatner.  Orbitz doesn’t have a garden gnome.  How are they supposed to compete against those who do?

Apparently, it’s tough.  The Chicago Sun Times recently reported that Orbitz has just announced another change at the helm of their marketing and branding efforts.  According the paper, their most recent hiring is “a familiar–and somewhat disturbing–occurrence…”  Apparently, Debbie Italiano will be the third person in charge of battling traveling statues and Captain Kirk in the last five years.

One way Orbitz has been trying to build and maintain its customer base over the last several years has been via the use of Orbitz promotion codes.  If you have a code, you can snag a nice discount on your Orbitz purchase.

Some businesses will offer online coupons that aren’t worth their weight in bytes.  That’s not the case here.  Orbitz promotion codes are often quite generous.  Let’s put it this way–they justify spending the time necessary to find them.  Just in case your past experience with online promotion codes leaves you skeptical, just look at this list of promo codes, all of which were available at the same point last year:

15% off Texas hotels: ORBTEXAS [book by 3/20, travel by 8/31]
$25 off 2+ nights: ORBTHANKS25 [book by 3/31, travel by 3/31]
$40 off 3+ nights: AORB40 [book by 3/31, travel by 4/30]
$75 off 4+ nights: 4ODWR75 [book on 6/1, travel 6/1-8/15]

$100 off 3+ night Grand Bahama Island package: GBI100 [book by 4/6, travel by 12/15]
$200 of 4+ night Grand Bahama Island package: GBI200 [book by 4/6, travel by 12/15]
$200 off 5+ nights international package: GAYPASSPORT [book by 4/30, travel by 6/15]
$50 off 3+ nights air & hotel package: PRIORITY [book by 5/31, travel by 5/31]
$75 off 3+ nights air/hotel or hotel/car package: 75ORBDOT [book by 7/31, travel by 8/30]
$75 off 3+ nights air & hotel package: DEALOVACA [book by 12/31, travel by 12/31]

That’s pretty representative of what’s going on at any given point in time.  If your travel plans match up with an Orbitz promotion code, it can save you a nice little chunk of change.

So, where do you find these?  Shatner isn’t going to help you find them, after all.

I thought I had found the mother lode of promo codes at CouponLoco.com, but it turns out that the only loco thing happening there is pretending that linking to various Orbitz special offers is the same thing as providing a valid promo code.  Obviously, it isn’t.

RetailMeNot.com was slightly more helpful.  They provided links to the special offers, too, but those were clearly marked as “sales,” and not as coupons or promotional codes.  They also had four different Orbitz promotion codes listed on their site at  the time of this post’s writing.  They weren’t all up to date, but they were genuine codes.

Savings.com had a few codes, too.  One of them was an apparently universally-applicable 10% off deal.

Other coupon and promo sites yielded similar, if not downright redundant, results.

I found that big list of last year’s promos at the Flyer Talk Forums.  I wasn’t able to locate a similar, updated list for current Orbitz codes, but I wanted to mention the site because it seems like it offers a real wealth of information to anyone interested in scoring the best possible deals on travel.  It appears to be a very active forum and the “Online Travel Booking and Bidding” area could be handy for anyone planning to set up their travel plans online.

The bottom line:  You’re going to need to do a little digging to find Orbitz promotion codes and many of those that are available probably won’t match your planned itinerary.  However, it is worth doing some investigation.  If you find a code that DOES match with your plans (or one of the generic x% off codes), it will more than compensate your for the research time.