Celebrate Cinco de Mayo with free tickets from Southwest Airlines!

by Grant Martin on

Happy Cinco De Mayo! In honor of this fifth day of May, we’re teaming up with Southwest Airlines to give away a free pair of roundtrip tickets to anywhere they fly.

That’s right, whether you want to fly from Albany to Albuquerque for your Aunt Jennie’s Apple Pie or Washington DC to West Palm Beach, for cousin Willy’s famous four-day Thanksgiving bar crawl, you can cash these tickets in on us.

Tickets are good to redeem up to one year from the contest end with no blackout dates for you and a special friend. Just leave a comment below telling us where you’d like to go should you win the tickets and we’ll randomly draw one winner by this Friday. Make sure you give a shout out to our friends at Southwest for providing the tickets for the giveaway as well.

Happy travels from Gadling and Southwest Airlines!

  • To enter, simply leave a comment below telling us where you’d like to go should you win the tickets (See a map of where they fly here).
  • The comment must be left before Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 5PM Eastern Time.
  • You may enter only once.
  • One winner will be selected in a random drawing.
  • One Grand Prize Winner will receive a free pair of roundtrip tickets to anywhere Southwest Airlines flies
  • Open to legal residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are 18 and older.
  • Tickets are valued at $400.00 per ticket.
  • Tickets are fully transferrable, are valid for one year, and are good for travel to any of the 64 cities Southwest serves.
  • Click Here for complete Official Rules.

Most expensive flight in coach? You tell me

by Jerry Guo on

Grant just had some in-depth and helpful posts about the best times to buy airline tickets. That got me thinking about a couple recent near-purchases on my part. What’s confounded me when checking out ticket prices is how geographic distance often has little correlation with the cost of the flight. Yesterday I was checking on flights from Newark, USA to Port Moresby, Papa New Guinea. The cheapest economy ticket? $4,000.

Yet some other equally hard to get places are somehow cheaper. A while back, I was trying to book a ticket to Easter Island, which by the way is the place farthest away from another piece of land (2,000 miles). You would think tickets would be expensive, right? They were only $1,600! Flying to the Galapagos Islands, 500 miles off the coast of Ecuador, was even cheaper. Less than $1,000. And a Newark to Beijing flight for me in March was only $800.

What about you? Keeping other things constant, which means I’m not talking about booking a ticket for tomorrow, what is the most expensive place you’ve flown to in economy class?

Using Facebook to find cheap airfare (and stalk people)

by Jerry Guo on

The hit social networking site Facebook recently introduced third party applications that serve various purposes. Some are useful: trading music tips. Some are more frivolous: killing zombies. Now there’s a nifty little tool that could save you cold hard cash. It’s an app called “Where I’ve Been,” which mainly serves to show your friends, well, where you’ve been.

But one of its newest features is “flight finder,” which lets you select a departure city and then view a visual representation of the cheapest fares to hundreds of international destinations. The best part is you can narrow the results based on how much you’re willing to pay. For instance, I wanted to go somewhere cheap in late December, so I selected Newark, NJ as the departure city and then used the slider to put a $500 max on airfare. Most of the dots that popped up were in Europe or the states, but I also found a $400 ticket to Lima, Peru.

One thing to keep in mind is the service is in beta right now, so important details like dates of travel haven’t been worked out. Come to think of it, I don’t even know which travel sites they get the data from. That hasn’t stopped rumors that the app has been purchased for $3 million by TripAdvisor.