Never flew a red-eye, and now thinking of doing it, the fares are much lower.

It will be San Francisco - St Louis (SFO - STL) 1 stop, leaving at 11 pm, arriving 6 am.

Of course I'm thinking of a mid-day nap, but what if the room is not ready yet?

How bad is it to fly at night? I recall sleeping a couple of ours on a trans-atlantic. Will fly coach, of course. United airlines.

What one-stop are you talking about?

I believe the earliest you can get to STL on UA is by taking the 11:15pm SFO-ORD, which arrives about 5am, then connect to STL arriving around 8:30am.

I must be missing something.

But in general, these short domestic red-eyes are horrible. Even worse than trans-Atlantic, as you get even less time to sleep.

May be... I've looked them up so many times, they are all mixed up in my head now Sorry!

Yes, this is the schedule... it says "1-stop" on United website. Layover actually.

Well... the longer I think about it, the worse it looks

I find red-eye flights horrible; it takes days to recover, and in retrospect it never seems worth it.

I took one recently for a business/few days off trip because I have miles on Delta; Delta has a wretched schedule to Honolulu and the only flight that worked for me for HNL-SFO was at night; the price was right ($300 RT) but I will never do it again willingly. I was a wreck. I'll either take a better flight or not go.

Domestic red-eyes (as stated above) can be rough, unless they're trans-continental. My decision to take one would be based on how well you can sleep on a plane and how quickly you can fall asleep and powernap. Rough as they might be, they are still my preference as I hate using a day of vacation for travel - but that's me. I recover pretty quickly, so they work for me.

I actually prefer red eye flights - I hate "wasting" a day of vacation to flying, if I can help it.

However, since I live in Hawaii my red eyes are a minimum 5 hrs on the plane, non stop. I probably wouldn't fly overnight if it was shorter than that or included a stop.

OK, I searched and searched and searched (yeah, like you are not familiar with this type of pain )

and came up with this: the cheapest I could find was $239 ($184 base + tax and what not!)

by adding only another $50 I got a non-stop one-way out of SFO leaving at 7.35 am arriving ~1 pm Alaskan $205 with tax

coming back Southwest one stop (I think I don't have to leave the plane!) $82 with all tax arriving OAK at 6.15 - I can still take BART home

Total $288, how did I do? Can I be proud of my plotting... err... planning

Hot dam!