Budget Travel - How to determine the cheapest city to fly from to get to city X?

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Perhaps this is not the best forum for my question, but here goes:

Does anyone know of any website that allows you to check what flights are available (and their cost) from a particular location on a particular date?

For example, if I want to get to city X, but I don't really care from what city I depart, I use itasoftware.com and just plug in various cities (like LAX-X, SFO-X, ORD-X, etc) and do lots of price comparisons. Is there an easier way to find out what the various flight options are available to city X?

Is it even possible for a search engine to do what I am asking???

You can use ITASoftware.com this way.

Just put the following as your departure airport (or similar):

SFO; OAK; SJC; LAX

etc. If you separate the names with semicolons, you can use multiple airports.

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I've noticed that Expedia has a new feature which offers you alternative departure airports from the one you have selected. It's a little pull-down menu near the top left-hand corner IIRC. I haven't used it or looked at it in much detail so I don't know if it fits the bill.

The alternative would be to look at a map that shows airports (many road maps do) and then use a booking/timetable tool, or the airport's web site, to find out what's available.

I've noticed that Expedia has a new feature which offers you alternative departure airports from the one you have selected. It's a little pull-down menu near the top left-hand corner IIRC. I haven't used it or looked at it in much detail so I don't know if it fits the bill...
The expedia menu only lists airports within a radius of 100-150 miles or so. I have used it in a cascaded fashion to move the radius out, i.e. selected an airport near 100 miles from home to then see additional airport (fare) choices.
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13F

Okay, but an inherent limitation with that method is that it only searches the airports you can think of to list. Is there some way to do a truly "global" search to ensure that you see all of your possible departure choices and not just the ones you can think of?

And, by the way, thanks for the tip!

ITASoftware allows you to search within a 300-mile radius of your selected airports. Somewhere around Flyertalk, someone came up with a string of airport codes you could type in, and by selecting the 'within 300 miles' option, it would search all airports in the US.

You could try the City low fare search option on bestfares.com. Pick your destination from the city list and you can see what cities pair up for the cheapest fare. If no airline emblem appears next to your choice, it is a Bestfares member fare, but they also list published fares. Then take your city pair to another site like ITA or Travelocity for availability and fare rules. It means more work, but sometimes yields good results.

Here's your answer:
http://search.travel.yahoo.com/bin/search/bfsearch?z=1&intl=us&dc=MSP&s=p

Just change MSP to whichever city you want the best fares to.

HTH.

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Some of those metasearches don't include the LLCs like Southwest and Jetblue.... just be aware of that.

Some of those metasearches don't include the LLCs like Southwest and Jetblue.... just be aware of that.

This is mostly due to how the airlines sell - they are LCC's because they don't want to pay the GDS fees.

Thanks!

One BIG question though: how do you create the search? When I change MSP to another city, I get an error message saying "the departure city is a required field." How can I get around this?


1) Look at the ADDRESS BAR of your browser ("http://www....")
2) Replace "MSP" (near the end) with whatever airport you want to fly to.
3) GO! ^

you can also use travelocity dream maps (http://dps1.travelocity.com/dreamMap.ctl?Service=TRAVELOCITY)..

just plug in your destination instead of dfw, and lower the price from $500 to wherever you want.