How Students Can Fly Cheap Online

B O S T O N, Dec. 14 -- In the past, when a college student forgot to make holiday travel plans in advance, they could count on being jammed into a packed car with their classmates for a long, slow ride home.

Online student travel agencies have changed all that.

Now, harried students can make plane reservations a few days before they leave, and not have to use all their tuition money to pay for it.

The 11-month-old Watertown, Mass.-based StudentUniverse.com and the 2-year-old Web site of Los Angeles-based Student Travel (www.sta.com) are the only ones exclusively devoted to meeting the needs of student travelers ages 18–33 online.

StudentUniverse.com and STA also compete with Council Travel, which also caters to students but does not allow purchase of tickets online. They provide all the functions that other travel Web sites like Travelocity.com provide, but they also have some tickets priced exclusively for students.

To purchase tickets, a customer must provide their birth date and college.

Rob Egan, StudentUniverse.com’s vice president of marketing, said the company does verify the information and notes that passengers must show ID at the airport.

Hard Part Is Finding Routes

The biggest risk seems to be not finding a student rate for a particular route.

Of five domestic routes — Boston to Los Angeles, New York to Los Angeles; Chicago to Dallas; Atlanta to Charlotte, N.C; Boston to San Francisco — none of them came up with a student rate for a departure date of Dec. 22 and return date of Jan 8.

International flights fared much better. A flight from Boston to London, which cost $853 on the USAirways Web site, cost $396.80 on StudentUniverse; a flight from Los Angeles to Paris was priced at $681. The same ticket went for $1,384 on Delta’s Web site.

But customers on StudentUniverse.com don’t discover what airline they are flying on until they purchase the ticket.

STA Travel had a better success rate — and identifies the airline before its customers buy a ticket.