ISU students traveling to the Insight.com Bowl in Phoenix are paying twice as much for the football tickets than University of Pittsburgh students.

According to the Panther’s athletic Web site, pittsburghpanthers.com, the university’s athletic department is offering Pittsburgh students half-price tickets with their student identification cards.

Pittsburgh athletic directors were not available for comment Wednesday night, but Pittsburgh students can purchase tickets for $24 as opposed to the $48 tickets offered to ISU students.

“I had no knowledge of this before,” said Dave Crum, ISU athletic ticket manager. “The information that I had received from Insight.com was that the tickets would be $48.”

Crum said he is waiting to hear from Insight.com whether or not the discount will be available to ISU students as well.

Despite the ticket-price confusion, Crum said there should be plenty of tickets available to students Friday morning, starting at 8 a.m.

“We sold our minimum allotment of 10,000 tickets by noon Monday,” he said. “But I don’t anticipate ticket problems; we can always get more.”

Even though students know the athletic department can order more tickets, some are still worried about a shortage and plan to camp out Thursday night in front of Hilton Coliseum.

“I’ll probably want to go out there the night before,” said Mike Witt, sophomore in agricultural education. “I’ll believe it when I see it — when they have more tickets.”

Witt said he doesn’t think Iowa State will give in to the discount prices but will instead “sell them at a higher price.”

“It seems to me the University of Pittsburgh cares more about their students than Iowa State,” he said.

Another obstacle facing students on the venture to Arizona is transportation. Tracy Nutty, travel service manager at AAA Travel, 226 S. Third St., said the airline prices are high, and many of the seats are already booked to Phoenix.

“On Monday a ton of people called,” she said. “We did searches for a lot of airfare, and it was difficult to find open seats.”

Nutty said she did searches in Minneapolis, Kansas City, Mo., Omaha, Neb., and Des Moines and said ticket prices were running between $1,200 and $1,700.

“We even checked places going into California and Las Vegas, and they were booked,” she said. “It’s just a hard time [to find flights] during Christmas time.”

Don Loudner, customer service supervisor at Southwest Airlines in Omaha, said direct flights to Phoenix are booked.

“On Dec. 28, all of our flights are sold out,” Loudner said, “but some of our flights were pretty full to begin with.”

Jan Breitman, administration specialist for the ISU Alumni Association, said the association is offering a charter trip for students and adults. “We’ve been talking about this since early fall,” she said.

The full tour includes round-trip charter airplane transportation directly to Phoenix from Des Moines, a three-night stay at deluxe hotels and the bowl ticket, Breitman said.

She said single tickets are priced at $1,455, while other tickets are available at double, triple, quadruple and child prices. Prices can be found at www.alumni.iastate.edu/events/bowl/insight.bowl.html.

While students camp out tonight in the cold, some will wish they could have gotten their tickets sooner.

“I think they should’ve done student tickets first,” said Andy Collman, freshman in pre-business. “If I don’t get a ticket, I will be pissed as hell.”