Cheap airfares for interview trail

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Retinamark

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I'm about to start out on an interview tour of the USA & was hoping you guys might be able to help me out with suggestions for the best websites to buy cheap one way fares? So far I'm going to be flying to around 10 cities in 5 weeks & any savings I could make would be very helpful

Thanks guys 👍
 
If you're lucky, your cities will have Southwest flights. They're pretty friendly about one-way fares, and cheap, too.

www.southwest.com
 
My advice would be to not make assumptions about the cheapest way to fly. I flew on many different airlines, and often the major carriers were cheaper than the discount lines. Also, I thought one way trips would cost a fortune and that I would have to fly back home after each interview. On a lark I asked an airline about getting a ticket from Cleveland to Dallas to Charlotte to Cleveland and the flight was cheaper than what the two round trip tickets would have been. I don't generally use Yahoo or Expedia to buy tickets but I use them to give me a ballpark price. Then I go to the company website. You can sometimes find better prices and you usually have a better choice of travel times. Finally, consider renting a car in one of your arrival cities and and knocking off a couple of places from there. For example, of you flew into Cleveland you could travel to Pittsburgh, Akron, and Toledo very easily. You could even do Columbus and Detroit if you didn't mind driving a little further.
 
If you want a quick summary of which airline may have the cheapest seats, go to this link:

http://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=fpfl&&zz=&&zz=1071762595085&&&zz=1096171191944&

Enter the cities, and you will get a display of all the fares from different airlines - click on "more rules" for restrictions on stay, day of week etc. - these fares are minus tax, but include Expedia's fee. After you figured out which airline has the cheapest flights, go to their website and play around.

You can also try www.air-fare.com, which updates the cheapest fares from each city every weekday.

The ITA software page is a good resource for finding the cheapest fares for specific dates: http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch/prego, though you can't book from this site.
 
Retinamark said:
I'm about to start out on an interview tour of the USA & was hoping you guys might be able to help me out with suggestions for the best websites to buy cheap one way fares? So far I'm going to be flying to around 10 cities in 5 weeks & any savings I could make would be very helpful

Thanks guys 👍

I'm assuming from you user name that you're applying in ophthalmology. You've already heard from 10 programs?
 
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