Thursday, August 10, 2006
There's an awesome website called SideStep that takes all your info and then searches a whole bunch of airline websites (orbitz, expedia, jetblue, etc) and brings all the results together on a single page. Then it's really easy to filter the results and find the best flight for you. It's all in AJAX and really well done.
The main advantage to this site (besides saving time) is it searches airlines that I may not otherwise have checked (like Alaskan, and AirTran) which have low cost flights.
I just booked a last minute ticket to New Orleans since there is a Phi Psi convention there this weekend and there are a whole bunch of Stanford folks going. I was able to get a really low fare using SideStep by searching for my outbound and return flight separately. Here's why:
When you search on a site like Orbitz, they may put you on a flight that's United one way and Delta the way back, but you still book it on Orbitz at once, pay a single price, get a single confirmation number, etc. SideStep will show you flights like this in the results along with all the rest.
What SideStep (or anyone) won't do is they won't send you to two different places to buy the tickets. They will never say "click here to go to Orbitz and buy your outgoing flight, and now click here to go to Jetblue and buy your return ticket. That's the best price"
So by going to two websites and buying each way separately, I got a much better deal. It's an interesting tip because I never previously thought to search for a roundtrip flight in two pieces.
The main advantage to this site (besides saving time) is it searches airlines that I may not otherwise have checked (like Alaskan, and AirTran) which have low cost flights.
I just booked a last minute ticket to New Orleans since there is a Phi Psi convention there this weekend and there are a whole bunch of Stanford folks going. I was able to get a really low fare using SideStep by searching for my outbound and return flight separately. Here's why:
When you search on a site like Orbitz, they may put you on a flight that's United one way and Delta the way back, but you still book it on Orbitz at once, pay a single price, get a single confirmation number, etc. SideStep will show you flights like this in the results along with all the rest.
What SideStep (or anyone) won't do is they won't send you to two different places to buy the tickets. They will never say "click here to go to Orbitz and buy your outgoing flight, and now click here to go to Jetblue and buy your return ticket. That's the best price"
So by going to two websites and buying each way separately, I got a much better deal. It's an interesting tip because I never previously thought to search for a roundtrip flight in two pieces.