So you wanna get across the US...

So you heard about some sweet travel deals on the coasts (WowAir's Valentine's Day $69 flight sale from San Francisco to London or Norwegian's just-announced $65 flights from the East coast to Scotland and Ireland, for example), and now you gotta get there. Now, each airport has different requirements regarding public transit, and I'm not going to go into that too much. Here is a basic guide on some ways you can get across America on the cheap, roughly rated from cheapest to least cheap.


0. Hitchhiking? I've never done it. Some friends have. They like it. I can't speak to it, and I probably wouldn't recommend it if you have a flight to catch as it's a slow process. But hey, I figured I'd include it so I don't look like a capitalist square.

1. Megabus, baby! Megabus releases at least one (but usually more than one) $1 ticket for EVERY bus, including the super-long-haul Dallas-to-Chicago and Chicago-to-New York. Megabus has routes along the West coast, and it connects the East from the coast all the way to Nebraska. So you can NOT Megabus all the way across the country, but you can get pretty close. You can find these if you're lucky sometimes, or you can get notified when they release a new batch of tickets and be pretty much guaranteed to snatch them up then. You can join my email list at the top of this page to get notified. You can also join the Megabus email list and they will occasionally notify you about other fun things, like the just-ended Marry-Me-on-a-Megabus contest. (Yes, really, you can enter to win to get married on a Megabus. Isn't that more like losing the sweepstakes? Even if it has fun decor. On the other hand, you can now get married at Taco Bell in Las Vegas, which sounds pretty ace.) Personally, I'd do a $1 miserable ultra-long cross-country Megabus trip if it would save me a hundred bucks. But boy, if you get motion sick like I do, you're better off Megabusing for like 9 hours or less.

2. Frontier and Spirit Airlines sales, brah! These are a lifesaver, and by that I mean I booked a $1 Megabus ticket from New York to Chicago, and then a $20 Frontier sale showed up, and I said, well hey, for $19 more I will not have to sit in a bus all night. Frontier and Spirit sales happen constantly and generally change multiple times a week. Know your hub! That would make a cool bumper sticker, and what it means is that these aren't the big guys, and they don't fly from every airport. So check their websites and see where they fly from, and where the sales tend to go to. For example, Frontier nearly always has some kind of sale to Orlando and Denver, and Spirit has some great deals to Las Vegas pretty often, so your cheapest bet to get fully cross-country without killing too much time on a bus would be flying Spirit to Las Vegas and then taking a Megabus or Greyhound from there to LA or wherever. Frontier usually has deals for flights on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Sometimes these show up the day before, sometimes a couple months. It's a bit of a crapshoot, though, because the regular flight might cost over $100 and you may not catch a deal.

3. Greyhound, amigo! I don't really love taking the Greyhound bus. I've had some bad experiences with shockingly rude staff and incompetency that nearly got me and another rider stranded on two separate occasions, and the prices aren't as absurdly cheap as Megabus - a cross-country ticket will set you back up to $259 one way, and no less than $100 no matter when you book. That said, they really go everywhere. So if you don't live anywhere near a Megabus stop, Greyhound can be a good bet. They also have a really kickin' loyalty program, which you can hack to get basically a free ticket anywhere. More on that later.

4. Er...am I forgetting anything? I think that's basically it. America doesn't have much in terms of rideshare sites, as far as I can tell. Sometimes people post rideshares up on Craigslist. You can keep an eye on sites like theflightdeal, Secret Flying, and Fly4Free for occasional big-airline deals, but you have to be lucky to catch one if you're not flexible. Amtrak is so expensive, I've never seen it as a cheaper option to flying.

Any other things I'm missing? Comment to let me know! Also, sign up for my email list at the top of the page if you want to get an auto-email every time I post, which is only sometimes, but always quality.