How to Attempt Flying Standby

Video Transcript

"Hi everyone, I'm Russ Handler, travel expert and you know what? Maybe you want to fly standby. You know, a lot of people are doing that more and more these days. That's because you get to buy a cheap ticket and then perhaps fly on a more expensive flight. Let me give you an example. Let's say you want to leave this Friday out of Tampa International Airport to New York City. The cheapest flight you can find is at 12:05 midnight, but you don't want to be there then. So what you do is you fly standby or rather you attempt to fly standby. You bring nothing more than a carry on bag because luggage could definitely upset the process because you want to get on a plane last minute. Flying standby you need to have a ticket but you can go to the airport up to 6 to 8 hours earlier, check in and then ask to see if any of the outgoing flights throughout the day have any open seats. If so, there's a good opportunity that the airline may decide to put you on that flight. So what you do is you go you check in then you go to each air side, talk to the nice people there, say you've got a ticket for the 12:05, you want to get on the 2:35 or the 5:05 is there any seats available. In some cases they will let you do that. But again, the key is getting there early, having your ticket, checking in as early as possible and then making a proactive effort to keep on these people to see if the planes that are taking off throughout the day might have an available seat for that specific carrier. If so, you're on standby baby and you're getting to your destination a lot earlier. I'm Russ Handler and that's how you do it."