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Joe St Sauver, Ph.D.
joe@oregon.uoregon.edu
If you're planning leisure travel as a way of doing your part to support our struggling travel industry, or if you are a student thinking about going home over winter break, you may want to know about some online travel resources to help you plan your trip.
The three most popular online sites for checking or booking air fares are probably Orbitz (http://www.orbitz.com/), Travelocity (http://www.travelocity.com/) and Expedia (http://www.expedia.com/).
To test those sites, we checked fares for a dozen hypothetical off-peak trips. We arbitarily picked Thursday, November 15 for our departure and Tuesday, November 20 for our return. All trips were round trip, for a single adult, and departing Eugene.Tested destinations included Spokane (GEG), Seattle, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Phoenix, Orlando, Honolulu, Quebec City (YQB), Paris (CDG), Tokyo (NRT), and Rio Di Janeiro--a mix of cities representing routine and more exotic travel destinations:
| GEG | SEA | SFO | DEN | CHI | PHX | ORL | HNL | CDG | YQB | CDG | NRT | |
| ORB | $185 | $153 | $216 | $257 | $346 | $204 | $298 | $535 | $545 | $583 | $741 | $1170 |
| EXP | $185 | $153 | $227 | $323 | $405 | $249 | $333 | $560 | $568 | $583 | $741 | $1175 |
| TRY | $174 | $132 | $227 | $323 | $418 | $249 | $400 | $541 | $708* | $1197 | $741 | $1371 |
| * Travelocity suggested a date change, which would permit a fare of $465 | ||||||||||||
What we found is that in most cases you should really check all three sites, because no single site could be counted on to consistently offer the lowest fare, although Orbitz seemed to generally do a little better than the others.
Virtually all major hotel/motel chains now have online websites, but the quality of those sites tends to be rather uneven in our experience.
One one-stop web lodging website you may want to consider as an alternative to going on a chain-by-chain search is http://www.usahotelguide.com/ This site does a really nice job of showing a wide variety of rooms for any given location, and if you click "View All Rates and Details" for a given property, you may be pleasantly surprised at some of the discount offers listed for many chains.
Note: Official travel for university business needs to be conducted in accordance with university travel policies (http://baowww.uoregon.edu/traveladministration.htm), which are currently in the process of being reviewed (http://baowww.uoregon.edu/travel/travelreviewprocess.htm).