booking inexpensive flights

[jcvieri]

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Hi everyone,

With interviews starting to come in, I am trying to find the most affordable flights possible. Can anyone reccomend any websites to find consistently inexpensive flights? It seems like there are a million different sites, but I am eager to hear from others regarding hidden gems that we might not know about. Thanks in advance.

 

[CaptainXRT]

I used hotwire.com and kayak.com for booking flights last year. Hotwire was also awesome for car rentals. Priceline for hotels. Hope this helps.

 

[napoleondynamite]

I always used site59, but you have to take a gamble and wait til the last minute to use it to get the best deals. But it worked out fine for me.

Priceline is great for cars, be sure to use the "name your own price" feature. Also, I found good deals on rentalcarmomma.com

 

[Wm Tell]

A lot of the discount airlines are not indexed in the major travel search engines, like expedia or travelocity. I go to their websites directly (southwest.com, airtran.com, skybus.com, allegiantair.com).

I agree that priceline is great for car rentals. It has cut my cost in half many times.

 

[3dtp]

A lot of the discount airlines are not indexed in the major travel search engines, like expedia or travelocity. I go to their websites directly (southwest.com, airtran.com, skybus.com, allegiantair.com).

I agree that priceline is great for car rentals. It has cut my cost in half many times.

That's what I do too. Add JetBlue to your list. Excellent airline, if it goes where you need to go. I used skylane express when I was interviewing.

 

[mmag]

Try farecast.com which tells you whether you should buy now or wait for a price drop

Also once you buy the ticket, try yapta.com which keeps track of fare changes. If your itinerary drops in price and you bought the ticket directly from the airline's website, you can call the airline and they will very often give you a credit towards future travel for the difference in price.

 

[UrbanAmish]

mo' interviews, mo' problems.

surfing the web for all these travel arrangements eats away at my step 2 prep, available credit, and sexytime.

i try to geographically cluster my interviews and stack same-day TY+radonc if in same city. another nice trick, if you're chaining interviews open-jaw, is to book roundtrip if it's cheaper than the one-way. just remember to be nice and cancel your "return trip" in a timely fashion.

also, google maps is your friend.


PS - jc, how was your away at MDACC?

 

[MD Helper]

Unfortunately, air fairs just sucks right now. $100 oil will do that.

AA.com tends to be as good or better than orbitz, expedia, etc for American flights. Express Jet's prices are good, but routes are somewhat limited. Southwest isn't as cheap as they used to be either.

If possible, book at least 2 weeks in advance and don't change. The airlines make a fair amount of money on high change fees.

best of luck to all on the trail!

 

[RadOncRudy]

Hi all,
Just thought I would suggest another website to check for cheap flights...studentuniverse.com. You have to register with and be approved by the site, but they actually had my med school listed and as long as your school is listed and you have a ".edu" email, it should work. They seem only to use United and AA from what I could tell, but usually the flights were about $50 cheaper than other web sites (or at least for the 3 flights I checked). The flight I just booked had times not offered on United's website which were the times I wanted so as not to waste an entire half day at the airport after an interview. Anyway, just thought i would share. Good luck everyone!

 

[IRISH22]

In case it hasnt been mentioned here before, Kayak.com is great for low fares. It has a particularly good multi-city feature, which is hugely important if you want to string interviews together. It seems to work just by searching other sites (orbitz, priceline, etc, as well as the airlines themselves) and links you to their websites directly. No fees that way.