Cheapest Way To Go To Atlantic City

4/4/2022

The cheapest flights to Atlantic City were $38 for round trip flights and $19 for one-way flights in the past 7 days, for the period specified. Prices and availability are subject to change. $10.75 is the cheapest price for a bus ticket to Atlantic City, according to recent searches on Wanderu. You can use our search to check if this price is currently available on buses from your city to Atlantic.

Despite its sometimes less-than-glamorous reputation, there are many reasons to get away to Atlantic City. Whether you like hot nights gambling, beautiful ocean sunrises, great food or just are looking for a place to get away, Atlantic City has something to offer you.

In Atlantic City, Greyhound arrives at 1901 Atlantic Ave, An average trip on Greyhound from New York to Atlantic City takes 3 hours and 1 minutes, while the fastest available Greyhound trip will get you to Atlantic City in 2 hours and 25 minutes, On weekends, Greyhound.

Actually, Atlantic City has a lot offers for you. Some of these offers are from hotels trying to win your business. Others from airlines that are trying to get you to fly with them instead of the other folks. Some offers come from restaurants or hospital groups that will help you afford all of that delicious food while you are there. Plus, there are travel sites like Expedia and Kayak.

Therefore, when planning a trip to Atlantic City, you have a number of ways to spend your vacation budget, but which way is the most affordable? How can you stretch your dollars the furthest and get the most?

I do a lot of travel and have spent a lot of time on various travel sites. I’m going to help you unravel how to get the best deal possible. What I won’t do is try to push any one program, site or company on you because that’s not fair. I will also do my best to let you know when I use a company so you can be confident you’re getting the best deal and I’m not profiting from it.

Determining “Cheapest”

Clearly we’re trying to find the lowest priced combination of hotel and airfare. Those are must haves (I didn’t include rental cars because rideshares are fairly cost effective and you can walk a lost of places in Atlantic City.) Beyond that, if we can get discounts on food or shows, we will take that into the final tally as much as possible.

Also, please keep in mind that any prices quoted were rounded to avoid giving firm prices. Any prices that I found while looking at this article are only good for the times I searched, from my home airport, and for that day. Please do your own searching to find your price.

Resort Websites

The first place to go when looking for good deals is going to the various resort hotel websites and see what deals they are offering. Sadly, this doesn’t usually include airfare, even in their “vacation packages.”

Normally, but not always, the hotels are going to give you the worst price of any source, but I like to start on the hotel website for three reasons:

Every now and then they will surprise you and offer a really great deal.
They establish a worst-case scenario for the highest rate you will have to pay for a given night. At least you have something to compare against.
They remind you of additional things you can sign up for to save money like email clubs and loyalty cards.

Also, while I am thinking about it, while you’re on the websites, sign up for those loyalty cards and email clubs. It takes a minute and you will save money.

Airline Websites

The next place to check for cheap rates is your favorite airline. For me, this happens to be Southwest (of which I am a member), but I am sure by merely mentioning that, some heads just exploded. I get that. Southwest is an acquired taste, but they’re cheap. They also offer vacation packages.

Cheapest Way To Get To Atlantic City

To get an idea of how much it might cost to travel to Atlantic City, I picked a weekend at random and searched for fares from my home city to Atlantic City. While prices will vary sometimes by the day, let’s say it was about $800 for airfare. Hotels were basically another $300 for a Friday and Saturday night.

Then, for comparison, I entered in the same days into the Southwest site to get a hotel plus flight package deal. Despite my earlier admonition that hotel websites are the most expensive, it was actually about seventy dollars cheaper to buy the flight and hotel separately than the package deal.

To be honest, that surprised me a bit. Oh, and I looked at Delta to get a comparison and found there wasn’t a good way to Atlantic City via Delta. Boo.

Hotels.com

I like to use Hotels.com to find cheaper hotel rates and am a member of theirs, though so far that only qualifies me to stay so many nights and get a free room.

For the purposes of this experiment, I tried to find the same hotel as I did use the Southwest package on the Hotels.com site. That particular hotel did not have any availability.

I looked at another property on both Hotels.com and the resort’s actual site and found that I could book a room in Atlantic City for about forty dollars cheaper than on the hotel’s actual website. That tends to be my experience (that Hotels.com is cheaper).

I have also found that you can call the hotel and they will give you the Hotels.com rate, which can entitle you to hotel’s own perks instead of the Hotels.com free night.

Travel Websites

To round out my research, I also decided to check out a couple of travel websites. I’ve had good luck with Expedia.com (and, in fact, I am Silver member.) I have also heard really good things about Kayak, though my luck with them hasn’t been fantastic.

Kayak

How Much Does It Cost To Go To Atlantic City

With that said I searched both sites for the same dates to Atlantic City. Starting with Kayak, I found that if I shopped for my flight separately, I could save about two hundred bucks. However, the only flight that Kayak found had me leaving at 6:00 AM on Sunday, robbing me of a day that I would get to spend in Atlantic City if I flew Southwest.

Similarly, if I looked up a package deal for the same days and hotel, I could stay for about a thousand bucks, but with the same unfavorable airline schedule. In this case, Kayak was not my friend.

Expedia.com

When searching on Expedia, I started off with the same base price for the package deal, which was fishy until I realized that I was on the same set of terrible flights. I then selected different flights and found a really great deal on American Airlines that was twenty dollars less than Southwest’s package deal and sixty dollars more than buying hotel and airfare separately.

In terms of pure cost, the winner is still buying each set of tickets separately. However, in terms of flight times, I have to give the nod to Expedia. Being able to comparison shop for better flights gave me an extra few minutes of sleep or an extra six hours in Atlantic City. Either way, it was a good deal.

Other Perks

Unfortunately, for the times and hotels I looked for, there weren’t any specials on food or shows with one small exception. Remember above when I said you should sign up for the loyalty program? I did notice that if you sign up for Harrah’s rewards program, it cuts down on the cost of food at their restaurant. So, that’s something at least.

Still, there were no gambling credits, discounted tickets, etc.

Part of that, I have to believe, is that Atlantic City either doesn’t need to discount its activities to get people to come or doesn’t find that to be a useful way to attract customers.

Either way, in a lot of cases, booking hotel and airfare individually will qualify you for special benefits from the hotel or airline that booking through a site might not otherwise give you. That’s why I tend to lean towards booking everything myself especially when I get to stay loyal to my favorite brands.

Conclusion: Be Flexible

I will say one other thing about this search. More than likely, I could have saved extra money if I was flexible on days or where I stayed. There were plenty of deals out there, so if you can, have a few different times you can go. Your wallet might just thank you for it.

I have to admit at the end of this exercise to feeling a little surprised by the result. I’m not surprised that I got the best deal by purchasing a package deal from a travel site. Their insight into how much other companies travel is too good and they have more options to choose from than I really want to seek out.

What did surprise me was the difference between the travel site price and buying hotel and airfare separately. In a lot of cases, I would have to think long and hard about whether it was worth flying a different airline, especially when the difference was so minimal.