Nothing about booking airfare is straightforward. The way airlines figure out how much to charge to get you from city A to city B drives me crazy. Idiosyncracies in the pricing system led to passengers booking hidden-city tickets with the help of websites like Skiplagged. While that method to save money on airfare doesn’t match our travel style, there’s another way to save I’ve looked into, and current technology makes it easier than ever to find these fares.
You can save hundreds of dollars on airfare if you’re willing to drive a bit further to a different airport.
Why Should You Look At Alternate Airports?
Of course, the first airport you’re going to look for is the one nearest your home. If you’ve turned on location services on your device, it might even fill that part in for you.
Since we live in Central Florida, the most convenient airport for us is Orlando International (MCO). It would make sense that with the level of competition, flights from MCO would be the cheapest…but are they? There are several airports, such as the other Central Florida area airports (Sanford and Melbourne), as well as Daytona and Tampa, that are all within a 100-mile drive:
If you expand that search to 150 miles, there are even more, including Sarasota, Palm Beach, and Jacksonville.
There are at least two reasons you might find a cheaper airfare from a different airport:
- If you live near a smaller airport with little competition, a larger airport with more airlines will often have less expensive airfares.
- However, a smaller airport may have less costly fares for direct flights serviced by low cost carriers who don’t fly to the main airport.
How To Find Airfares From Nearby Airports
Most of the online search engines make it easy to find alternate airports. However, not all of them are easy to use.
Say you want to fly from Providence, RI, to Las Vegas for a weekend. What would be the best and cheapest way to get there?
The ITA Matrix tool makes it really easy to select alternate airports. Once picking your home airport, just click on “nearby.”
While flying from Providence would seem to be the best option, there aren’t many good flight options. One-stop trips on the major carriers start at $500 for a round-trip ticket.
You can expand the search a bit to include Boston Logan and Hartford, CT (Bradley) and get different results:
Then there are non-stop options with JetBlue and Delta:
Besides being a non-stop flight, the prices are also half of the fares from Providence.
If you’re looking for a more user-friendly interface, Google Flights can also search nearby airports.
What To Consider When Booking At An Alternate Airport
If it was only as easy as looking for a cheaper flight when considering driving to a different airport. There are several other things to consider besides price.
If you’re driving a long distance to an airport, you need to factor that time into your travel. Is the flight early in the morning? If so, you’ll have to leave in the middle of the night or the day before and pay for a hotel. Would that expense eat into your savings? You also have to consider the airport parking, gas and tolls in the cost.
Finally, there’s the time of the return flight. If you arrive late in the evening from a long day of travel, you’ll still have a long car ride home. That’s not taking into consideration the chance of flight delays.
Final Thoughts
Driving a little further to an alternative airport can save you a significant amount of money on flights. Even if the price isn’t much different, choosing a different city to fly from may provide better airline options and direct flights.
However, it’s important to consider the additional costs and time spent when traveling to a further airport. Everyone values their time, comfort, and ease of travel differently, so when deciding if this makes sense for you, Your Mileage May Vary.
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4 comments
I live in between Boston Logan and Worcester regional and needed a day trip to NYC pre-pandemic. Jetblue had a flight out of ORH for half the price of BOS and with an early am departure and night return, it fit my schedule perfectly.
Also something to consider in the big picture is gas and parking as well. Gas was about the same, but parking was $7 at ORH compared to $38 for BOS for the day.
I live 20 minutes from ORH but rarely use it because there are often flight cancellations or major delays. I did fly ORH-MCO last year and it was fine, but we came back into a snowstorm and our flight home was delayed several times before finally taking off 4 hours late. Meanwhile, Hartford (BDL) an hour away had no delays. Hartfoed, Providence, Worcester or even Manchester NH are better options than Boston where you have to allow an hour extra to be stuck in traffic and the parking is insanely expensive.
I ran into a cancellation nightmare.
Outbound ORH-JFK was fine.. but the return JFK-ORH was cancelled on the day of my return and for what appeared to be the rest of the week. I had to fly back to BOS, then Uber to ORH to pick up my car that I left there while in NYC.
I think they got rid of the JFK flights after a while as I haven’t seen once since 2022-ish.
I live 50 mins north of SEA airport and 2 hr south of YVR (Vancouver BC, CA). Couple of years ago I found a killer deal on business class for my family of 4, open jaw YVR-SEA-CDG and BCN-AMS (4 day stop over) -YVR for just $1570 round trip per person all in on Delta, Air France and KLM. Yes full business class and F on Delta between YVR-SEA. Yes we drove 2+ hours to YVR just to fly back to SEA but exact same ticket flying out of SEA would have cost us at least $2000 per person more. Go figure.