Pre-trip:
The biggest part of the pre-trip for me was the booking of my ticket. Before the travel bursary was paid into my account, I began to compare flights to New York. New York has three main airports, La Guardia, Newark (in neighbouring New Jersey), and JFK. JFK is the biggest and you will probably find all the majority of cheap flights go to JFK. I used Travelstart (www.travelstart.co.za) to compare flights before booking the flights through the websites themselves. Bear in mind the prices of the flights fluctuate on an hourly basis, and there is almost no way to know if the price will drop or increase if you wait longer. My advice would be to settle on a price you are comfortable paying and book your ticket. In the end, after booking my ticket, the prices went up by about R3000, so luckily I booked it when I did! There is also a trade-off to consider when flying to New York, namely, the travel time vs. the cost. If cost is not an issue, then the most comfortable way of travelling would be to take a direct flight from Cape Town or Johannesburg to JFK, which is a longer time flying non-stop, but you will arrive earlier. As a student, cost constraints factored into my calculations, so I chose Turkish Airways, which was cheapest by some margin. The downside to this was a very long transit time, which included stops in Johannesburg and Istanbul, but then again, I did save a lot more money.