Cost saving travel tips for parents of college students

Parent Cafe
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<p>I don’t profess to be any kind of an expert on this subject, but I was a professional travel agent for 16 years. One part of my job was to help parents of college students figure out the grueling task of getting to and from school especially at the holiday times, so here are a few tips.</p>

<p>1.If you don’t already have one or more, get a credit card that gives you miles for dollars spent. Many of my clients would buy everything including groceries on their cc and then pay it off at the end of the month. Thousands of miles can be accrued this way.</p>

<p>2.Get your students college schedule as early as possible and for those set times such as Thanksgiving and Christmas, book as early as possible.
Note that for Thanksgiving, EVERYONE is trying to fly on Wednesday returning Sunday. If you can schedule your student for before Wednesday or on Thanksgiving Day and return on Saturday or the Monday following, it can typically give you huge savings. The blackouts dates usually fall in line with the days that the most people will travel, so you try at all costs to avoid those. Blackouts meaning that your frequent flier miles may not be applicable and the fare will be higher. It does not matter how far in advance you try to book if it is a blackout date.</p>

<p>3.Use your frequent flier miles wisely. If you can buy a ticket for less than $300.00, it might be wise to save the miles for when a trip could cost your student double or triple that. Possibly the time when they have no advance notice or a Saturday night stay. Note that it costs the same amount of miles typically for a one way as a round trip.</p>

<p>4.If you live near to an airport that Southwest Airlines or other discount airlines service and there is an airport likewise for where your student goes to college, look at those options. These airlines are often less expensive and other airlines will match in that market to be competetive. For instance, the airfare into Providence, RI is sometimes as much as 2/3 less than into Boston. Sometimes there is a bus, train or van service that can be used to help with the distance difference. This of course depends on where you live. Obviously the coast to coast fares are much more costly than up and down the East Coast.</p>

<p>5.Look on Craigslist for people who are offering their Southwest Rapid Rewards coupons. These are completely transferrable and useable by anyone and you can find people who advertise them all the time. Ebay is not a good source for this but Craigslist is.</p>

<p>6.Find out if any family members are business travelers and have more frequent flier miles than they can EVER use. Sometimes a family member would love to help out your college student but just hasn’t thought about helping in that way.</p>

<p>7.If you own a vacation home or timeshare, consider trading someone some miles for a stay in your home or timeshare.</p>

<p>8.Sign your student up for frequent flier accounts as eventually if you are able to stick with one or two airlines, they will be enough for a free ticket.
Parents you sign up too so that you can be collecting miles. Even though you are paying for all of the tickets, you cant get all the miles in your account. Everyone has to have their own account on each airline.</p>

<p>With search engines now being so user friendly, it is quite easy to shop online, but I know the challenges around finding airfares at the time that everyone else wants to fly. </p>

<p>Hope this helps. Good luck to everyone in their college process</p>

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<p>In our house hotels = Priceline!</p>

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<p>Thank you britbrat. I knew most of those tips, but some were new to me and appreciated. I hadn’t thought, eg, to look on craigslist for Southwest coupons.</p>

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Better yet, get a ‘cash back’ card rather than a ‘miles’ card and you can use the cash for any aspect of the trip.</p>

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This is a good idea. I’ve had several Southwest travel coupons expire because I didn’t use them. I should have tried harder to give them away.</p>

<p>Also, remember that you might want to use a pile of miles for a European or other foreign trip if your kid decides to study abroad. In order to do it you’ll usually need between 50K-75K miles though depending on the airlines and the timeframe. I’ve had a difficult time redeeming miles on American due to the low number of ‘saver’ award seats they have - especially in the summer which is when my D went abroad. I ended up using United miles instead but the only seats were the 75K mile expensive seats. I was able to send my D to a study abroad with one which helped with the out of pocket costs.</p>

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<p>Southwest also has a generous reinstatement policy. For a 50 dollars fee, you may be able to revive expired credits. I believe the purgatory for expired rewards is 24 months. </p>

<p>By the way, a little known tidbit about Southwest is that students receive double credits and that it is not hard to convert older accounts to benefit from the double credits. It is, however, necessary to sign up.</p>

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<p>xiggi:</p>

<p>Thanks - I’ll check into the resurrection possibility if I think I might use them. I happened to check into the similar resurrection of some other airlines’ miles and they charged so much that it was almost a wash as to whether it was worth it or not although it would benefit people who are just short of the miles they need.</p>

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<p>Great ideas and something I needed right now!</p>

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<p>For those who don’t necessarily need airplanes, Amtrak has a link to Student Advantage discount cards. These provide 15% discount on trains and buses. Also, students can use these cards for discounts on lots of other stuff too. It costs money to enroll in the program, but it is worth it! Also, we stay in Motel 6. Yes, I know, it’s bare bones. But it is clean, and really very reasonable. After all, you just need a clean bed and a good bathroom. Also, it’s not so close to the school, so we don’t really ever have a problem getting a reservation. We are able to drive to the school (3 hour drive or so), though, so transportation is not a problem.</p>

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<p>ucsd<em>ucla</em>dad, Yes it can be difficult to use the AA miles. If indeed you know of dates of international travel, you can book almost a year in advance to get the seats. Also, if you can look around online for the seats on AA.com, sometimes you can find an airport nearby that is less popular and use train trans. for the rest of the trip ie. look at Manchester, or Birmingham England to get to London. The season will also be a concern and if travel can begin before June 1, it a cheaper season. June 1-Sept. 30 is considered high season for most airlines for international travel, and again it does not matter how far in advance you book it, it will still be high season. Hope that helps a bit.</p>

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<p>Two great travel sites just for College Students and faculty are [Cheap</a> student airfare deals, hotels, travel | STA TRAVEL | Home](<a href=“http://www.statravel.com/]Cheap”>http://www.statravel.com/) and [Cheap</a> Tickets for College Students and Faculty: Airfare, Rail and Hostel Deals](<a href=“http://www.studentuniverse.com/]Cheap”>http://www.studentuniverse.com/) </p>

<p>We booked my son’s roundtrip ticket to London through STA travel and he will be able to change the departure date for only $35 plus the cost of the difference of the tickets. The ticket is on British Air, cost of booking through STA was just a bit more and included an international student discount card. If we booked it through BA, it would cost $250 to change it, plus the difference in ticket costs.</p>

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<p>britbrat:</p>

<p>I and the family actually flew into Manchester last summer and I did try to find ways to do it on AA but it just wasn’t feasible (and I didn’t care if I went into Manchester, Heathrow, Gatwick, Glasgow, etc.) so I ended up just going on Delta (SAN-ATL-MAN). Another time I tried to use AA, again in the summer, to get some tickets to Frankfurt and it could have been done but only by stopping at several airports (as opposed to LAX-FRA) that would have taken over 24 hours of traveling and I didn’t want to do that to the family. I did just now use some AA miles for a cross-country trip but had to use the ‘non-saver’ ‘anytime’ miles (double the miles) to get the seat. </p>

<p>Also, I’ve never planned a trip a year in advance and tend to be last minute on these things which doesn’t help. I have planned a few a month or so in advance, which is very advanced planning for me, and it helps. AA just doesn’t have a lot of ‘saver’ seats on flights during peak periods. With the cutbacks and ‘fee-grubbing’ happening now due to fuel costs I expect it’ll get worse.</p>

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<p>Agreed. Happy to help if you ever need a different angle. I am no longer a TA, but do enough for friends and family that I try to keep up on the “tricks of the trade”. We are in SoCal as well, so I understand the challenges of those long coast to coast or intl. trips.</p>

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<p>Thanks britbrat. I’ve traveled pretty extensively over a lot of years so I know a fair amount of the options. One that I’ve done a few times is to drive up to LAX and travel from there since there are more nonstop flights and often times less expensive flights. Saving $100-200 or more per ticket and multiplying that by 4 family members makes it worth considering. I’ll also check other alternative airports around here like John Wayne, Long Beach, Ontario and on the destination end will also look at alternative airports. That’s how I ended up going to Manchester. It turned out to be a better choice than Heathrow/Gatwick anyway since we were primarily tooling around northern England, Scotland, and northern Wales on that trip (we had already been to London and that area). </p>

<p>Speaking of last minute - sometimes there are deals to be had then as well. I once made last minute reservations to Hawaii where I left I think 2 days after I made the reservations and the ticket price from SAN to Hawaii was less than the trip I’d taken from SAN to San Jose the day before. I think I got lucky then though.</p>

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Check the partnership arrangements airlines have with each other for awarding miles. We have Alaska FF accounts and receive miles anytime we fly Northwest, American, Continental, and others. D took non-stop flights from home to school via Northwest and all of her miles accumulated on her Alaska account - she was able to redeem a roundtrip to Europe on British Airways (another partner) for her graduation present to herself.</p>

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<p>Where on Craigslist do you look for people selling Southwest travel coupons? Is it under Services:travel/vac or someplace else? And do you just look under your own city or is there a way to search?</p>

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<p>Go to the side bar and click on a city like Phoenix or Dallas, etc. and then type in the search box Southwest Rapid Rewards
Good Luck</p>

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<p>Great, thanks! Gosh, I feel stupid - I never noticed that search box before on craigslist. :o</p>

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<p>patsmom? Did you find what you were looking for?</p>

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<p>Yes, I did. Thank you so much! :slight_smile: </p>

<p>We’re really fortunate that Southwest serves both the hometown and the college town. Now I’ll be bargain hunting for those Rapid Rewards certificates!</p>

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<p>Kathiep is right about the two sites (STA Travel and Student Universe). They are about the only places I use now for tickets for my daughter. I can always get them cheaper there than anywhere else. The prices change daily though so you need to check frequently until you can find the price that you want. And if you see a ticket for a good price you should buy it because it may be gone the next time you come back.</p>