Best way to find domestic US flights?

March 11, 2004 7:29 AM

What's the best way to go about finding domestic US flights? Is there a decent site which considers lots of different airlines? What should I do about finding out what airlines they might not include?
posted by biffa to Travel & Transportation (5 answers total)

I'm a giant fan of smarterliving

You pick your departure airport(s), and they show every single thing on sale. Plus they list every airline sale going, pretty much, and they have a weekly email they send that lists them too.
posted by amberglow at 8:45 AM on March 11, 2004

I like SideStep. It runs off your desktop (through IE) and directly queries airline web sites on your behalf. (It also does hotels and rental cars). Airline web sites usually have great deals, so this works well.

SideStep works as a toolbar in IE. It also kicks into gear automatically when you query any other travel site (like Yahoo! travel or Orbitz). That feature gets it labelled "spyware" by some. But that's easy to turn off, and the whole thing is easy to uninstall once you're done with it. (Of course, the only time I use IE is when I want to use SideStep, or maybe visit a Microsoft site, so I leave it installed).
posted by profwhat at 9:00 AM on March 11, 2004

ITA Software has a great search engine for flights. Worth a look at.
posted by smcniven at 9:53 AM on March 11, 2004

The problem with ITA (which powers Orbitz) is that it does not include most of the discounters, like Southwest or ValuJet/AirTran.
posted by calwatch at 2:33 AM on March 12, 2004

Ahh. Seeing as most of the flights I've used it to check withhave been inter-Canada or Trans-Atlantic I wouldn't have picked up on that. Thanks for the tip.
posted by smcniven at 5:26 AM on March 12, 2004