How to Find the Cheapest Flights and the Best Flight Deals
Most travelers will have budgets. Some will be on the most stringent spending plans possible. We understand this fully, and we’re going to breeze through a few tips that may help, and have helped us in the past.
2023 Update: Google Flights
Google Flights has been around, but only recently has it truly developed into something beneficial in many scenarios. Prior times, it was hit or miss, and often unorganized. It has certainly upped its game. There are a few features to look for. Price tracking is a great function that allows you to put a tailored notification on your tentative itinerary and you can relax and wait until there’s a strong enough price drop to be notified.
When you book through 3rd party comparison sites, you aren’t always guaranteed the price you see and book. Countless times have I been notified 24+ hours later that the price was changed, tickets were cancelled, etc. Safe to say, I don’t use those sites anymore for anything greater than comparison references. Google Flights has a new price guarantee badge that can pop-up on certain flights. The best part is that it not only guarantees your flight at that price, it watches the price every day until you leave. If the price drops, they pay the difference! At the time of writing, this is limited, and possibly only within the United States, but it’s an amazing feature.
Lastly, they have improved much of the data and sources to allow the cheapest booking times to be something that is actually steady now. The history can help you assess what the average ticket costs were for that route and compare to see when they were lower. If it was significantly lower in recent times, or often, then you can wait further to find a better price. Awesome 🙃
Search Multiple Sources
Whether you have a go-to website as the source of most of your trips, it cannot hurt to shop around a bit. It’s just like the doctor’s office, get a second opinion. For domestic travel, things like Cheap-O-Air, Expedia, etc. come to mind. However, these do not always yield the best results. Often times these brokers will offer packages or fairly low prices, especially compared to direct booking through airlines. This may be tempting to jump on the first offer, but do not. At least reference a second website/app to verify the range is correct. You have to also consider flight time, airline company, layovers, luggage inclusions, etc. These may not be optimal in every search.
Book In Advance
Unless you’re forced to make last minute plans, attempt to book at least a month prior. Airlines do not discount things last second like other products, this would corrupt their overhead as everyone would be waiting. We typically know we’re going to travel at least 2 months out. We then scour a few websites to compare prices, and often at different points in the day and week. If the prices haven’t fluctuated much, it’s a safe bet they won’t change much lower after 1-2 weeks of comparing. This would be the time to book as any later will just drive it upwards, most likely. If you can manage to book in extreme advance, then you may lockdown really low fares.
Try To Utilize Specialized Discounts
For example, since the pandemic (2020+) there have been “first responder” discounts toward many things. Rental cars are a big one where this worked well (check ID.me). Some flights also had deals at some point. Additionally, it’s possible your AAA, AARP, Costco, etc. memberships will have linked discounts. The best deals I have found are typically through student linked discounts such as “StudentUniverse.com,” yet these will only apply to students (and sometimes family). Also, banking linked travel, believe it or not, has proven to be very effective at price matching and/or beating it marginally. Chase Ultimate Rewards Travel is quite good. They also weed out the less safe, more problem prone airlines for you (which we don’t recommend using unless absolutely desperate). You will earn bonus miles/points upon booking through banking travel sites as well. For example, my Chase Sapphire Preferred is typically 2 points for flights. However, booking through Chase Ultimate Rewards Travel website (same flight), I saved a little bit of money and also my point rewards will be 5x now. It was a win-win.
Maneuver Different Routes
Let’s say you’re flying from Los Angeles, CA to London, UK. Those are two large hub cities and it will likely be easy to find the cheapest flight. However, let’s say you live in a rural area with a tiny, yet international, airport. It is very likely your flight will be near double the cost and have at least one layover. A little trick is to search a flight from your local airport to the closest large hub cities. This may be extremely cheap, say $100 or less. Then, check flights from that large hub city to your destination. This method has proven to work well in many occasions. Granted, nothing is guaranteed to work. Sometimes you just have to fork over the cash. The second nifty trick that many search engines feature is a “multiple city” option. It can often be well hidden. Majority of people choose round trip, fair enough. However, travelers often move about as much as possible in their allotted time frame of the trip. This results in flying to one airport and flying out of another. Many times in our past, we’ve booked one way tickets in each direction not knowing about the multi-city option. For example, next month we’re flying from LAX to London Heathrow Airport. Next, we’re flying out of Edinburgh Airport back to LAX. Round trip from LAX to London was about $700, which is already higher than it used to be. Doing a one way from each airport was over $700 each way. That was over double the cost of the round trip. Choosing the multiple city search and inputting the different departing locations revealed the total to be about $750. This, essentially, acted as a round trip when searching, and it cut costs significantly. This may seem common sense to some, but many do not pay attention or even know this exists. Next time, check it out, it’s awesome!
Select Package Deals
Lastly, if you’re going to fly somewhere, rent a car, and get a hotel, try a package deal just to compare and set a default precedence. Sometimes they’re great, other times they’re not. Costco is well known to have decent package deals, but only on popular locations. AAA can often help you sort out any other destination with this as well. Or, become an avid member of a particular organization, such as hotels.com, and earn points and perks while booking packages. This is recommended if you travel often. The same concept with hotel chains as well. Choose a Marriott, Hilton, or others and stick with them to build up reward points. Later, these can be exchanged for free nights, which we do often. This is also, possibly, the most convenient route if you hate planning.
Check Your Credit Cards
Some credit cards have great things included such as airport lounge access, free rental car insurance, and travel insurance. If you get an airline credit card, you may have free miles for free trips and continuous free checked luggage which is stellar. We have opened several airline specific cards in our time simply for their introductory bonus miles that usually cover one round trip flight between the US and EU. In fact, if you have the credit score for it, you can achieve awesome introductory perks just by opening a new card before your annual large vacation. Keep in mind, most companies/banks require 24 months between collecting these perks, so you must stagger which you apply to every year.
Buy Your Tickets in the Country You Want to Travel to
How can this be possible, you say? It’s pretty simple, use a VPN. There are free VPN options. However, I recommend Nord VPN or Express VPN. To provide you an example, I live in the USA. If I wanted to travel to Spain, I would set my IP address to a Spanish server, via my VPN. Once this is done, fares can drop. This isn’t a set in stone work around. Yet, it has shown to be a viable tactic upon my trials. Within my research, this little hack may be even more beneficial for Asian countries. Give it a shot. Good Luck!
