The Shorthaul – Delta/JetBlue: New York – Fort Myers, Florida (and vice-versa) $150. Roundtrip, including all Taxes

The Shorthaul is a new semi-regular feature from The Flight Deal created to address an inherent challenge with our service. Our 6 cents-per-mile criteria for posting fares allows very few good deals that are short flights to be posted. For example, New York to Chicago is 1,467 miles; therefore, the fare cannot exceed $88 for non-stop service using our baseline rule. However, there have been many sales in the $120-150 range that we have been unable to post simply because it did not meet the strict 6 cents-per-mile criteria.

The Shorthaul will address this challenge with two new baseline criteria for short flights:

1) Under $200

2) Under 3,000 miles roundtrip

Our regularly scheduled The Flight Deal posts between 10AM and 3PM EST will remain intact. The Shorthaul, however, will be semi-regular (read, don’t expect this every day/week) and will be posted around 5PM EST for East Coast deals and 8PM EST for West Coast deals. For The Shorthaul, we will publish mileage for the trip but not cents-per-mile calculations.

Now onto our first Shorthaul deal! Fort Myers, located in the Gulf Coast, is a nice change of pace compared to the Atlantic beaches of Florida. This is also great for around Christmas time (about $190).

Thomas Edison Pier @ Fort Myers, Vietnam Photo: roger4336, used under Creative Commons License (By 2.0)

Sample Date:

October 4th – 9th (Columbus Day Weekend). Valid for travel from September – May 2013. Use ITA Software Matrix Airfare Search and flexible month search to see availability — enable advance routing code and enter “dl+” on both outbound and inbound field to search for Delta only or “b6+” to search for JetBlue only. Must purchase 21 days in advance of departure.

Routing: