Have you ever felt that urge to travel somewhere as soon as possible, but the moment you saw the airfare prices you gave up? It happened to me so many times… But the more you travel, flight hunt and talk to other travelers – the more you start to understand how to save up on airfare prices. Here are some tips on how to find cheaper flights. Hope this makes you go airfare shopping:
1) USE DIFFERENT SOURCES TO FIND FLIGHTS
Websites such as Skyscanner, Kayak, Momondo, Hipmunk, Routehappy, Google Flights, Adioso… are great for finding cheap flights or cheap deals (accommodation, car rentals…). Check out as many of these sites as you can.
2) BOOK 6 WEEKS IN ADVANCE FOR NON LOW-COST FLIGHTS
If you’re planning on traveling to a different part of the world, start looking for airfares 2 months in advance and be prepared to book a flight as soon as the price drops down. You might also get lucky with a last minute flight, but nowadays that’s very rare as more and more people travel all over the world.
3) CHECK OUT THE LOW-COST AIRLINES RULES
A) As opposed to traditional airlines, different rules apply to budget airlines. The cheapest fare is the earliest one. So whether you’re traveling with Ryanair in Europe or Air Asia in Asia make sure to book a flight as soon as possible. The low-cost airlines are pretty amazing and you can find flights starting from € 9,90 .
B) However, be careful with some other things: low-cost airlines tend to charge money for taxes, bags, food on board… so make sure to check the rules and to uncheck all the unnecessary things from the check-boxes.
C) Also, these airlines tend to land on secondary airports so be sure to check how much more you’ll have to pay to get from that airport to the city.
4) TRAVEL OUTSIDE THE SEASON
Of course you wanna go to Australia in the December/January if you’re from the Northern Hemisphere, who wouldn’t want to spend Christmas in a bathing suit? But that might be a very bad idea for your wallet, so instead – try going off season and you might save a pretty large sum of money.
5) AVOID TRAVELING ON THE WEEKENDS
Even though traveling on the weekends is a must if you’re leaving for a weekend getaway, when planing longer trips try traveling from Tuesday to Tuesday – you will save a lot of money that way.
6) BOOK FLIGHTS ON FARE SALES
Fare sales tend to be for the months of the year when fewest people travel (January, February, March, October, November). However, you might find a fare sale for November already in September so make sure to check airline websites every now and then.
7) BOOK FLIGHTS ON A TUESDAY AFTERNOON
Airlines tend to release their last minute deals on a Tuesday, as they tend to start their sales on a Monday evening. So there is this theory that Tuesday afternoon is the best time to book a cheap flight.
8) USE SKYSCANNER’S “EVERYWHERE” BUTTON
Just write down your departure place in Skyscanner and select “EVERYWHERE” as the arrival place. This will give you a list of cheapest flights from your departing airport to other destinations.
9) BUY 2 ONE WAY TICKETS
More often than not you’ll have this situation: you find a very cheap flight to your destination of choice, but when you choose the return ticket the price drastically jumps up. So let’s say you fly to London with Ryanair – it might just be that the ticket to London costs only € 20 , but the ticket to come back from London is 5 times as much. So what you should do is: buy the one way ticket to London, then find another airlines and buy another one way ticket to come back home. This doesn’t always work, but it’s something worth trying out.
10) COLLECT AIR MILES
A great way of saving money, especially on long distance flights is to have a membership card of a certain airlines and collect air miles. The more you travel the more frequent flyer free miles you’ll get.
11) SIGN UP FOR FREE ALERTS
Yeah, i know – we all hate receiving a lot of emails, but this might come in handy. Almost every airfare search website let’s you sign up for free alerts. That way, when you think you just got spam, you might just be pleasantly surprised and take off to a new destination.
12) THE CHEAPEST DAYS TO FLY ARE TUESDAYS AND WEDNESDAYS
These are the days of the week with the most empty seats on flights. So what does the airline do? They lower the price of airfares for these days.
13) FLY OUT EARLY
The cheapest flight is usually the first flight in the morning. But make sure to check if you’ll have to pay more to get to the airport that early in the morning, or have any additional costs. It’s an option worth checking out.
14) TALK TO PEOPLE
I know it may sound like a silly advice, but it’s quite a good one actually. When I was traveling through Southeast Asia and looking for fares online I still hadn’t discovered many of the local low-cost airlines that I heard of later – speaking to the locals and other travelers. For instance: I planned on traveling in Vietnam via buses and trains to save up some money. And then I’ve heard of VietJet Air talking to some other travelers. Turns out that was way cheaper than taking 15 hours bus rides, and I’ve managed to fly from one destination to another for not more than $ 10 per flight.
