Fly or Drive

Have you ever been planning a trip and find yourself pondering, fly or drive? I have got to tell you about a website I found that can help you make that decision. We’re planning to visit family in Missouri this summer and in the past we’ve taken trips by car and by air. It seems so expensive to fly a family of four, so driving can be tempting. Especially if you have good car travelers like we do!

Well, the site travelmath.com is really a great way to help you visualize whether to fly or drive.

You can use their calculator to figure out a lot of options, but the one I like the best is “cost to fly or drive”.

Once you chose “cost to fly or drive” then input your from location and to location, you’ll get an intial comparison for 1 person.

However, the site allows you more access to adjust the “trip” to fit your numbers and needs. Any of the “blue” numbers can be changed. So for us, I changed the number of travelers to 4. I also know that the time I’m looking to fly, I can get a flight cheaper than $449.00 so I changed that too. Other options to add are things like airport parking or transportation, number of hotel nights when driving, how fuel efficient your vehicle is, and the current gas price.

You can see that for us the “driving” option was better (lower number), however seeing it all listed out made us decide to fly. Once I added in some roadtrip food costs and made our value of time higher, they were basically even. One aspect the calculator doesn’t consider is that when you travel by car you can stop and sightsee along the way. This is one of our favorite perks of roadtrips!

I have no relationship with travelmath.com, they probably have no idea who I am. I just found them on twitter and checked out their site, then I couldn’t wait to share it with my readers!

Happy travels!