Airports

Austin is the capital of Texas, so although it’s not the state’s biggest city it’s still a safe bet to assume that Austin has its own airport. (You’re right, it does.) But that doesn’t mean you only have one option when you’re making travel plans for the Austin City Limits Festival. In fact, if you’re hunting for the cheapest airfare out there, it’s a good idea to look at all airports within a reasonable drive of Austin.

Of course, what constitutes a “reasonable” drive will be different for each traveler, but when you consider that there are three major cities within a 3-hour drive of Austin and those cities may offer a significant savings on your airline ticket, then the drive might start to look like a really good option. Bring (or pick up) some friends and make a road trip out of it.

When considering flying into a different airport than Austin’s airport, the main thing you want to take into account is whether you’ll cancel out all the savings from your airfare by renting a car and paying for gas (which is another reason bringing friends helps). And if it turns out that flying anywhere but Austin is just too much of a hassle, be sure to read about how to find cheap airfare to Austin City Limits Festival to avoid paying full price on your ticket.

>> Austin City Limits Festival is from October 8-10, 2010

The popular Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival draws upwards of 80,000 people to a small town in central Tennessee – so one of the first orders of business if you’re planning a trip to the festival is finding out which airports are close by to figure out what your options are for getting there.

Bonnaroo takes over a 700-acre plot of land in Manchester, Tennessee each June, but flying to Manchester isn’t an option. The city is helpfully located 60 miles from two different Tennessee cities with their own relatively large airports, however, so you not only have an airport within about an hour from the festival – you have two. Plus, there’s a third option a bit further away.

So, for those of you who are further away than driving distance, here are the airports that are closest to the Bonnaroo Festival.

>> Bonnaroo runs from June 7-12, 2012

There are travel enthusiasts, and there are sports fans. Both can be evangelical about their passion, so you can probably imagine what happens when you combine the two. All it takes is a major sporting event to bring out the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) of these crowds – but the good news is that you don’t have to be both. A huge soccer fan or a travel junkie can appreciate the idea of going to South Africa for the World Cup in 2010, and the trip might make each group appreciate the other group as well!

One stumbling block on the road to South Africa, however, is that airfare to any of the World Cup cities isn’t cheap – and the prices are only going up between now and the tournament. Along with these other suggestions for how to find cheap airfare to South Africa for the World Cup, I wanted to talk about the idea of flying into alternate airports in a bit more detail – since there are nine host cities, there are more options to cover.

Often times when you’re flying into a major city, it’s a good idea to look at airports other than the main airport for that city in case one of the smaller area airports has cheaper flights. This isn’t always the case, but it’s almost always worth looking.

In South Africa, there are nine cities where World Cup games will be held, but not all of them present mutliple-airport options. In this article I’ll talk about the airports in some of the World Cup cities – which will be handy whether you’re looking for alternate airports to fly into or if you’re flying between cities in South Africa to attend games in multiple cities.

There are few things that are as satisfying as combining two things you love. For instance, if you’re a football fan who also likes to travel, what’s better than taking a trip to see the Super Bowl? It’s even better when you consider that the Super Bowl is almost always in a city that’s relatively warm in the winter, so that if you stay more than a day or two you’ll get the added benefit of a warm weather vacation in addition to a football game.

But if you also love saving money, then you’ll want to know all the tricks you could use to get a good deal on a trip to the Super Bowl in Miami, right? Well, one of them is to fly into a different city than Miami.

Wait, what?

You heard me. Yes, the 2010 Super Bowl is in Miami – but that doesn’t mean you only have one choice for airports in Miami to fly into. Yes, there’s a big airport located right in Miami – but there are also a couple other airports within a reasonable distance that are worth checking for cheap airfares, too.

Here are the alternate airports for Miami that you should look at if you’re hunting for cheap airfare to the Super Bowl (and a little bit about Miami International Airport, too, because we’re nice).

One of the things travel experts will routinely tell you when you’re looking for ways to find cheaper fares is to be flexible. That usually means things like researching more than one travel date around the date you think you want to fly, or being willing to set a 4am alarm if that’s the best way to get a cheap flight (it is).

But I’d like to suggest another thing you might want to consider when you’re learning to be a flexible traveler – flying into a different airport altogether. We recently wrote about some of the alternate airports for Vancouver International Airport, any of which might provide an opportunity to save you some money on a flight to Vancouver for the Winter Olympics, but we’d like to focus on one airport in particular for this article: SeaTac Airport.

Although there are airports closer to Vancouver than SeaTac is, it’s for that very reason – because they’re closer – that it’s much simpler to get from those airports into the city of Vancouver. From SeaTac, which is more than 130 miles south of Vancouver, it’s easy to see why it would be confusing and a bit daunting to try to figure out how to get from SeaTac to Vancouver.

But you don’t have to figure it out. That’s what we’re here for. Here are the best ways of getting from SeaTac Airport to Vancouver.

Most of the time when you’re planning a trip, you choose the airport closest to your house and the airport closest to your destination as the beginning and ending points of your travels. And most of the time, that makes sense. But when you’re on the hunt for all the possible ways you could save money on a flight that looks like it’s going to be more costly than you’d hoped, you learn to think outside the box.

In this case, “thinking outside the box” means looking for airports other than Vancouver International Airport as an entry point for your trip to the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Yes, the Olympics are in Vancouver. Yes, Vancouver’s is the closest airport to the city and most of the events. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only airport you should check for flights – especially if you’re waiting until the last minute and trying to avoid the high costs of a last-minute flight (assuming the flights aren’t all sold out by that point anyway). There are a few other airports in the area which are worth looking at, whether you’re planning ahead or buying at the 11th hour.

Here are the alternate airports you might want to consider for a trip to Vancouver for the Winter Olympics.