If you can find a parent who works at a travel agency or a large corporation with an inhouse travel department, that's your best bet. This is one of those cases where I think you need to know somebody. Sometimes agents who book lots of tickets are given free vouchers with few (if any) blackout dates, so you might be successful in getting them to give one of those up. Going directly to the airlines is probably a waste of time because they get so many requests.

Updated question:
We are getting a few hotels, but now we are trying to figure out how to approach airline tickets. Someone else is handling this because I was unsure of how to make sure that we don't end up with those "show up at the airport and pray no one else does so you can get on the plane" tickets.

Suggestions or is this a pie in the sky idea?

Hmmm....Maybe this was more obvious to other people, but I learned the hard way .

Don't call B&B's in the morning - they're serving breakfast. - Oh, yeah that second B stands for breakfast - doh!

I looked up the tourist info online for my state and am calling resorts. I'm getting a 20% success rate. Some casinos are giving and others are offended by the idea. I wanted to say it's for the parents, not the 3rd graders, but .... I bit my tongue and said "Thank you for your time." Yet again

Kmamom, thanks for the heads up on reservation problems.

I'm ordering the Holiday Inn catalog of hotels, so I can search by location and call each hotel. What other chains have books like that?

Like Michelle said, contact people at least a month in advance, some places even require 3 months in advance for donations. Write to the individual offices concerning hotels; they set the rates for themselves and have leeway to negotiate. Just make sure you get guarantees in writing; a lot of times hotels will bump "nonpaid" reservations in order to accomodate paying ones (that happened to someone I know when they won a bid for a hotel stay in Washington DC--they kept getting bumped and in the end found that they had donated $ for a reservation they never got to use). From what I've seen with our PTA here in Jersey, I'd write/call the attraction directly. Some of the attractions around here are very generous with what they're willing to donate as far as admissions go.

[ 02-17-2004, 07:45 AM: Message edited by: kmamom ]

If you are interested in Reno, NV hotel/casinos, you can get their addresses from the yellow pages and make requests at least a month in advance. You send a letter to the marketing dept and be specific in what you want or you may end up with a bunch of buffets that you have to fly in to use.
The casinos have been very generous with our local schools. I don't know how they would do with others but it's worth a try.
Peppermill is my FAVE! [img]smile.gif[/img]