Overnight flights from Virginia to McAllen that work with schedule?

Question

I have a little bit of a problem.. My boyfriend is in the army and he's up near Richmond(RIC), Virginia. I'm in McAllen, Texas and the nearest airports are well, Brownsville(BRO), Mcallen(MFE), and Harlingen(HRL) and I'm planning on taking a flight this month (any weekend really) on a Thursday afternoon (well, a 4:00 flight that connects in Houston) and I want to come back Sunday overnight.. like leave at 10 PM or later (even 2AM or anything that will get me back early Monday) so I can spend the entire day with him. Most of the flights on Sunday either start at 6AM or stop at 4PM. Is there anyway to find an overnight flight? I have to be back early Monday because I am taking classes at the university and they start at 8:00. I've tried Expedia and every airline I could think of but I see nothing overnight except for flights that take 14 hours because they make 4 stops or so.. Does anyone have any advice please...?

Answer 1

My first thought for you was Allegiant Air connecting via Sanford, Florida to Greensboro or Roanoke.  However, it looks like they've stopped their McAllen-Sanford service.  So...

I tried http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispat... for you next.  It searches weekends for an upcoming month. It also lets you adjust outbound and return dates to narrow it down from Wed-Tues or Fri-Sun or Thurs-Sun. for example.  It also lets you search multiple airports simultaneously.  You can enter from BRO;HRL;MFE to RIC;ROA;GSO;PHF;CHO for example.  Doing this turned up $513 outbound Sept. 25.  Moving on to times....

Looks like the latest you can depart on a Thursday to connect you in to one of those airports is 4:45 p.m. from MFE.  Taking the latest flight back on Sunday, departing RIC 4:55 p.m., total comes to $812.50 r/t.  Yikes.  Take the 6a.m. return and it's still in the $500s r/t total.

You might be better off to take advantage of weekend specials that airlines sometimes have.  Being flexible enough to leave from 3 airports, and arrive at 5 airports (the ones I listed above) increases your chances; you'll just have to make sure the time works for your connections.  So, for example, let's say Continental puts McAllen-Houston on sale for $119 for the upcoming weekend, and puts Houston-Richmond on sale for $169 same weekend.  If the times work out for you to make your own connection, you could save a lot.  This site is good at listing upcoming weekend flight specials: http://www.smartertravel.com/airfare/sea...

Before committing to a price, run your final itinerary through http://www.bookingbuddy.com which searches Sidestep, Kayak, Orbitz, Mobissimo, etc. etc., airlines direct, sales, consolidators, etc. etc. aggregators, etc. ... all in 1 go.  It saves you a lot of time and hassles since you don't have to find sites, then type in your info over and over again.

Answer 2

try kayak.com and sidestep - the websites do a query of almost all airline companies so you can compare.  set your own preferences