SideStep Helps Travelers Find Cheap Flights

Elizabeth Fairchild — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:07:55 +0000

Make life easier with SideStep

SideStep won't make your airplane food taste better, but it sure makes getting the ticket easier.

I have been on a lot of ticket searching sites. I mean, how many are out there now? Cheap Tickets, Expedia, Airfare Watchdog, Orbitz, Travelocity … you get the point. But, I think I have found my favorite: SideStep.

SideStep is perfect for someone who wants the process to be as quick, painless and cheap as possible. I have never found a well-priced flight so quickly.

No frills

If you just want to see when the cheapest flights for this month are — and quickly — this is the best route. I thought I was going to have to use my credit card or take out personal loans to fund an upcoming trip, but I found an affordable ticket in no time on SideStep.

You simply plug in your departure and destination city, and voila, a calendar pops up. It shows all of the cheap flights for the next month. Click on the price listed the date you want to leave, and it’ll show you the ticket details.

Could you be more specific?

SideStep lets you specify whether you want a round trip, one-way, multi-city or weekend trips. When I plugged in two cities the flights that popped up were on weekends anyway. Then it showed me the ticket price for a roundtrip if I wanted to stay one day or two days. (It was the same price.)

Granted, if you want to travel on a day when a low airfare is not offered, this site could be frustrating. But in my opinion, it should be every traveler’s first line of defense before combing through a million flight times and airlines to find the cheapest route.

How SideStep works

The SideStep homepage, which is actually a form asking your departure and destination cities right from the get-go, explains:

We search over 200 travel websites to bring you the very best travel values on the web.

For searching 200 databases, this thing sure works fast. But if you don’t believe it, you can compare SideStep’s prices to Airfare.com, Hotwire, Priceline, Expedia and Travelocity with the click of your mouse.

OK, a few frills

For travelers who want to search for hotels and rental cars along with their plane tickets, that’s an option, too. However, you have to chose one of the other five travel web sites and it will re-route you but display the results anyway.