Student Ticket Agencies
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I needed to book a domestic flight for next month, and with such high airfare prices lately, I spent the last few days trying to find the best airfare deal. While I wouldn’t call the ticket I ultimately purchased a great deal, given the current economic climate I’m pretty happy with it, and, much to my surprise, I ultimately ended up booking it through StudentUniverse.com.
STATravel and StudentUniverse.com
There seem to be two major student ticket agencies out there — STA Travel and StudentUniverse. These ticket agencies target students and (in some cases) faculty, and employ some weak level of verification that you really are a student. In the case of StudentUniverse, my .edu school email address acted as verification . Both STA Travel and StudentUniverse heavily market international and “study abroad” travel services (flights, hotels, train tickets, etc.), but also sell domestic air tickets as well.
Trouble with STA Travel
Take this as anecdotal evidence if you will, but I ended up going with StudentUniverse partly because of the difficulty I had using STA Travel’s website, which seems to both be poorly designed and questionably functional. To begin with, STA Travel’s website was simply slower for me — searching and page loading took an annoying amount of time. Furthermore, whereas StudentUniverse and most travel websites will list flight options as results to a search, STA Travel instead returns “fare” results — different prices that are available — and then you have to click through an extra page to see which flights are available at that price. That extra page you have to click through — especially on a slow web page — can cost lots of time when you’re comparing different options.
Finally, and most significantly, I could almost never get STA Travel to completely price out any itinerary on my route — it kept telling me that there was an error and I needed to call in to complete. I’m sorry, if their website can’t complete the purchase, I’ll find another vendor. I don’t trust that I will be able to resist the pressure of call center agents if I have to call in.. The one or two times I did get STA Travel to complete the itinerary online, the price jumped significantly (in some cases close to a $100), virtually wiping out the so-called “student savings.” While I completely believe that STA Travel really does have good deals, my experience on my particular flight-pair left me feeling like STA Travel was trying to deceive me with student rates that were not actually available.
Going with StudentUniverse, Conventional Wisdom
With StudentUniverse, on the other hand, I had a very pleasant experience. The site was fast and responsive, and made it easy to compare prices and options. Most importantly, every time StudentUniverse offered a flight pair at a specific price, it would actually let me buy it; never did it end up changing prices during the process, like at STA Travel. Furthermore, a quick check of RetailMeNot found a $10 coupon, saving me even more money with StudentUniverse.
The conventional wisdom I had always been told was that these student ticket agencies were great for internernational travel, but that they seldom had great deals when it came to domestic travel. At least in this case, that approved to be incorrect advice, as I saved $75 on my flight through StudentUniverse compared to what any other website was offering. Its probably worth keeping StudentUniverse, and perhaps even STA Travel, in mind for the future.
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Hi,
What forms of student identification did you have to provide at booking ( on the net) and at the gate (airport)?
@Tom –
I have only actually purchased tickets through Student Universe. During the registration process, they’ll ask information about your school and your expected date of graduation, and they’ll ask for your school email address. If you provide them a .edu email address, they appear to simply accept that as identification. (If you don’t have a school email address, they say they can verify it through other means, but I don’t know how that process works — for me, the .edu email was enough).
As far as at the airport, I have flown on StudentUniverse tickets several times, and each time was not asked for any student identification (all were domestic United States flights on American or United) — I suspect that will be the case in almost all cases at the airport; the airline isn’t going to really care. I had a friend fly on a STA Travel ticket from the US to Rome and was also not asked for student id.
STA Travel I think has similar policies, although I think they require that you get an ISIC card. I have an account with them to search, and it appears that my student email address may have been enough there, too.
Thanks Richard.
It is Student Universe- and I do have a uni email address ( I am in Australia).
The only thing is I just graduated- so technically I am not student anymore. I guess as you said though, if I can book the ticket I doubt I will have any problems when I get to the gate….