Free
trips to Hawaii, Mexico, and Costa Rica
Oh,
it helps if your name is Patrick, Patricia, or Green, and if you happen
to live in Oakland, Denver, or Sacramento
By
Reid Bramblett
ARTHUR
FROMMER'S BUDGET TRAVEL
Charter/packager
SunTrips—the consistent budget champ to Hawaii and Mexico—seems to
have caught a bit of the Irish fever. SunTrips is celebrating the
addition of Costa Rica to their list of destinations by giving away 300
round-trip tickets for free on St. Paddy’s Day. Are there catches? Of
course there are.
SINCE THE giveaway happens on St.
Patrick’s Day (Mar 17), SunTrips thought it’d be cute to give folks
named Patrick, Patricia, or Green a leg-up on the competition by letting
them call in and book while the rest of us waste precious minutes
mucking about the SunTrips Web site to find the password.
Well, not really. The password is
an easy one: “Leprechaun” (though they may make you spell it, I
don’t know). Then, the tickets are yours.
The main catch is that you only
have that one day in which to book—and you can bet they’ll
“sell” out very quickly. However, SunTrips is being generous with
the departure terms. You can nab a free seat for any flight between Mar
18 and June 11 on almost all SunTrips routes, including:
Oakland to Costa Rica (flights begin May 18), Cancun, Los Cabos, Puerto
Vallarta, Oahu, Maui, the Big Island, or Kauai
Sacramento to Maui
Denver to Cancun or Puerto Vallarta
Oahu to Maui or the Big Island
Kauai to Oakland
GETTING TO THE STARTING GATE
Other gateways are not available because SunTrips uses charter flights
(oh, the other big news is that they’ve gone back to serving hot meals
on the flights), and those leave only from the above airports. Live
elsewhere? Not to worry. The great low-cost airlines of the USA fly to
the rescue.
Southwest (www.southwest.com)
has lots of flights into Oakland and Sacramento, and cheap-yet-chichi
JetBlue (www.jetblue.com)
also wings it into Oakland. Frontier Airlines (www.frontierairlines.com)
has its base in Denver, or ATA (www.ata.com)
can get you to Denver via Chicago.
Chances are that with one of those inexpensive carriers, you can fly
roundtrip into the SunTrips gateways for under $200, so you’re still
getting a steal of a deal to continue on to Hawaii, Mexico, or Costa
Rica for free. (It would help, obviously, to check into which
carrier/gateway will be the cheapest to get to from your hometown before
Mar 17; that way you know precisely which free tickets to ask for when
you call.)
I WANT MY FREE TICKETS!
All you gotta do to “win” this giveaway is to call
1-800-SUN-1785 on Mar 17. Actually, it might take precious seconds to
work out which numbers spell “SUN,” so consider this translation
into pure digits a little equalizer gift from Budget Travel:
800-786-1785.
When someone answers the phone, say
“I’m calling about the St. Patrick’s Day Giveaway,” say the
password (“Leprechaun”) or your day-appropriate name, and you’re
in. To make things sporting, they won’t give all the tickets away at
once. They’ll release the free tix in three batches of 100 each at
11am, noon, and 1pm (that’s Pacific Standard Time).
The other big catch? You only get one seat per call. That’s right. You
either go solo, hope your spouse gets through on the cell phone
simultaneously, or you’ve got to pony up the dough for a second ticket
at the regular cost (which, with SunTrips, isn’t much). Sure, that’s
a bit sneaky, but we can forgive them, can’t we? After all, it don’t
get much more budget than “free.”
MORE FINE PRINT
‘Course, you do have to pay the various taxes and fees, which can
total up to $110 per person (but you’d have to pay those anyway, free
ticket or not).
But—and this is quite stand-up of SunTrips—you don’t have to
purchase anything else, such as nights in a hotel, to get the freebies.
The tickets are gratis, no strings attached. That said, SunTrips does
usually offer excellent bargain rates on hotels and car rentals, so you
might want to do them a solid and repay the favor of free tickets by
booking that ocean-view room.
To read the fine print
(including how much you’ll rack up in taxes for each destination), get
more details, and figure out how to spell “leprechaun,” head over to
www.suntrips.com.
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