Student travel websites to check out

If you remember the days of student standby, you’re probably old enough to have a college student of your own. And that means you may fork out a lot for your student’s travel home.

There are the usual ways around that, including shared rides, a staple of every student’s life, and airline tickets bought on opaque sites such as Priceline or Hotwire, which can send you on an inconvenient route.

One option I’ve recently encountered is StudentUniverse.com, which is aimed at students and faculty. “We go out and negotiate on students’ behalf,” said Atle Skalleberg, vice president of marketing for the site, which has been a travel agency since 1992 and online since 1999.

Savings on airline tickets average 14%, he said — “sometimes [you save] a lot, sometimes a little.”

Just to see how fares might vary, I searched StudentUniverse, STA Travel (also a big name in student travel), SideStep (an aggregator) and Hotwire (an opaque site) to see what kinds of fares I could get if I were flying my student home from Washington Dulles to LAX on Nov. 26 (the day before Thanksgiving) and returning on Nov. 30 (the Sunday after Thanksgiving).

Here are the results:
StudentUniverse: $486
STA: $469
SideStep: $437
Hotwire: $566

These fares may no longer be available when you do your search, but they do point out that shopping for the lowest fare may be worth your while. (And being flexible. Hotwire suggested that by leaving a day earlier and returning a day later, I could find a fare of $409.)

Holiday travel tip: As we get closer to the holidays, this also suggests something else for moms and dads: You may have been the kind of student who waited until the night before to write that term paper, but don’t do that with the airline ticket for Junior’s ride home.

With the number of seats reduced this year as airline capacity continues to decline, you’ll certainly pay more — in many cases much, much more — if you wait much longer.

Click here for more tips on budget travel.
— Catharine Hamm, Los Angeles Times Travel editor

[Image: studentuniverse.com]

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 27, 2008 at 2:01 pm by Catharine Hamm and is filed under Airline travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.