It's time to begin thinking about summer, and along with lining up an internship and planning that Hawaiian vacation, students have to consider how they are getting home. For those that live far enough away to preclude driving, this means scouring the Internet for airline tickets.
With the plethora of sites that promise the lowest fares and largest discounts, just buying a ticket can turn into a major research undertaking.
For example, for a student who wants to travel from Boston to Los Angeles, the cost of finding the ticket is inversely proportional to the flexibility put into finding it. Good deals await those who are willing to search through the maze of travel offers.
Several travel websites cater specifically to the student population, offering basement price airline tickets, hostel memberships and railpasses. While these offer some amazing international deals and the occasional domestic steal, most require a large amount of flexibility from the traveler.
Tickets with a long time span between the departing and returning flight, such as a round-trip ticket home for the summer, are not readily available.
Airlines also often place limits on the number of tickets that may be sold at student rates, which means popular routes or days may frequently be unavailable if purchases are made far in advance.
This explains those mystifying occasions when a previously discovered itinerary doesn't turn up in subsequent searches on these websites: all the student tickets for that flight have been sold.
STA Travel, a student travel website, currently offers very competitive tickets to London. Boston to Heathrow is going for $333, but there is a catch " one must travel before June 15.
For Boston to Los Angeles, no round-trip tickets were available. A one-way search, though, yielded a departing and returning ticket for $196 and $204 respectively, on Delta and Continental airlines.
Even so, buying from student websites was consistently cheaper than buying directly from the airlines. Delta's lowest price, $580, was significantly higher than the STA Travel quote. Continental's price was double that of the student website, at an astronomical $850.
For these airlines, it was clearly cheaper to purchase through STA Travel. The website didn't list tickets on other airlines that fly from Boston to L.A.
Student Universe, another student website, also did not have a round-trip option between the two cities. Instead they offered one-way tickets for the same price found at STA Travel, $196, this time on American Airlines. Attempting to buy a round-trip ticket on American for the same dates ended with a price tag over $1000, and one-way tickets, while cheaper, were still $450 each.
Student Universe, offering slightly cheaper tickets to LA, also won out in the international fares department. A ticket from Boston to London was just $267, and travel is not limited to this season only.Both student websites offered tickets on major airlines for drastically lower prices than could be found buying the tickets directly from the airlines. But even though the "members only" style of student travel websites would suggest that they offer fares lower than those available to non-students, this isn't always the case.CheapTickets.com is a discount site open to buyers of all ages, and unlike either of the student websites, it offered a round-trip fare that would accommodate the spread-out travel dates a student needs for a flight home over the summer.
Their cheapest fare from Boston to Los Angeles was on American Airlines for $367, with a connection through Phoenix. This price is slightly cheaper than the individual tickets on the student websites, though those who dislike connections might prefer the nonstop one-way flights.
Travelocity offered the cheapest Boston to Los Angeles fare of any website -- $330 round trip, on Continental and United Airlines, but with two connections each way. This well-designed site yielded a cheaper fare by allowing the user to choose nonstop or connecting flights and showing all available airlines.
For those on a serious budget who don't mind sacrificing convenience, Priceline.com is a good option. This site has a novel approach -- name your price. The buyer quotes a ticket price and if it is accepted by an airline, Priceline locks in the ticket for the buyer to purchase.
The obvious flaw is that once a quote is submitted the traveler must buy the ticket if the quote is accepted by an airline. Those who submit a quote agree to travel anytime between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. on the selected dates, and make one connection.
There is no way to specify certain times or airlines, though, so this is not a good idea for the choosy traveler.
Overall, the prices offered by the discount travel websites were fairly comparable, all within the $300 range. The options offered by each website differed widely, though.
The key to finding a cheap ticket lies in the ability to search all available airlines and flight times on a given day. However, sites that have preferred partners often restrict the shopper to airlines that might not provide the lowest price for a particular itinerary.
The student websites were fun to browse, and when looking for vacation fares or a ticket on a nonspecific day, they might offer a great price. The larger Travelocity and CheapTickets, though, display the greatest number of airlines and flight options, which allows more choice in flight time and overall lower ticket price.
