I would like to travel to San Jose, Costa Rica in 2010 during spring break. Is there a search engine that will show me the cheapest flight to San Jose from any city in the US? Or, do I have to search by individual US city? I could easily get to another city in the US if the price is right. Any advice would be appreciated.

Travelocity used to have a feature called dream maps that let you search like that, but I'm not sure it still exists.

http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch

There is no search engine that will give you what you need. ITA Software, which AAFF links to above will let you search multiple cities, though. Just input the list of cities in the "From" field, like this: BOS, JFK, ORD, MIA and on.

However, I find that ITA delivers only partial results when you do this. In other words, you will get more results for JFK if you search for JFK alone, than if you were to search on the full list above.

Regardless, for a flight to Costa Rica, I doubt you would save enough money booking two separate tickets to make it worthwhile.

ITA also lets you search a 300 mile area.

sidestep.com

I have an old bookmark to the travelocity dream maps webpage but the webpage doesn't work correctly. It doesn't show the map anymore.

The Dream Maps wouldn't help anyway. They showed the cheapest destinations from a single airport. The OP is looking for the cheapest departure point for a single destination. The two prices are not necessarily going to be the same, particularly given the timing over spring break.

I'm just bummed because I missed out on a promotional fare from LA to SJO for $218 RT (not including fees)!! Argh, should have jumped. BTW, I have travel vouchers for UA that could get me to a destination within the US if I could find an incredibly cheap ticket to SJO -- that was the thinking anyway. I'll keep looking. Thanks for the links, Fodorites!

www.airfarewatchdog.com

You can check fares TO a specific airport or FROM a specific airport. Sounds like either of these options might be of help to you.

The dream maps would have been useful. You would just specify SJO as your departure airport and then you would see fares to the other cities. Likely that the fares would be the same either way. But at least it might point to the cheaper airports. Woulda been worth a shot.

Interesting that you saw such a cheap fare this far in advance.

I would assume that the vouchers can be used only on UA-operated flights. If that is not the case, then be aware that you can book a trip to SJO at united dot com. It will show you flights that you can buy, operated by Lacsa or Lacsa/TACA connections. Or call UA and say you want to fly to SJO and use vouchers.

<i>Likely that the fares would be the same either way.</i>

I don't find this to be true, at all. I routinely see differences of 20% or more on pricing ex-Europe, vs pricing ex-US. These are two separate products. One may want to travel USA-Destination during summer, but Destination-USA during winter.

Figured you would argue that.