I’ve seen tons of articles about how to find cheap flights, some of them are good, some of them pretty much suck. After flying around the world for an extremely cheap company, and being a little “frugal” myself, these are the methods that I’ve found to work best.
Your spouse comes home one day and informs you that you’re going on a family vacation. “Great!” you say, “where are we going?” “Oh, we’re going skiing with my family in Colorado, isn’t that wonderful?”
You’re world spins to stop. Crap. Not only are you going to be cooped up in a condo with your spouse’s family, now you’ve got to listen to your brother-in-law (you know who I’m talking about) go on and on about how he scored his flight so cheap. “What?” He says, “you paid how much for your tickets? I would never pay that much for my tickets.” “You’re so savvy Judd,” you reply, while in your mind you’re dumping his craft beer over his head and soaking his Che Guevara shirt.
Well, don’t worry. I’m here to show you how to score some sweet sweet low priced tickets. For the most part these are for somebody who’s got a few months notice, but some of these can be used if you’re traveling on short notice. If you follow my advice you’ll be able to wipe that smirk off of your vest-wearing brother-in-law’s face. Unless he’a a churner (see below), you can’t compete with that kind of crazy.
Cheat Sheet
Research
Research is the number one rule of how to find cheap flights. You log onto Kayak, you put in your information, and it comes back $400 round trip from Chicago to Denver. Is that a good price? You don’t know because airfares are constantly changing. That’s where research comes in. Most sights will let you sign up for a low price alert and they’ll email you when the price goes down (see the burner email trick below). You can sign up for that, or you can log on everyday and see what the price is doing. Some sites have a “buy or don’t buy” feature, I don’t trust that because they’ll say buy when the price comes off the very highest price but isn’t at it’s lowest yet.
Sign up For Alerts
How to find cheap flights? Sign up on all the travel companies websites. They’ll send you flight pricing updates, who’s having a sale, and even short notice flight pricing. Got a free weekend? Yeah, when that Orbitz email comes in and says fly round trip to Miami in February for $100, jump on it.
Companies to sign up for? The top ones are Orbitz, Travelzoo Top 20, Expedia, Kayak and Southwest Airlines. Don’t want all those emails cluttering your inbox? Sign up with your favorite email provider for a new travel deals email just for travel deals. Because once you do a search and you’re signed up, the emails will be hitting your inbox hard and heavy.
Search Engines
There are plenty of different search engines to use to find cheap flights, but you have to understand the difference between them. Kayak searches flights and tells you where to find them, but they’ll redirect you to another site when you go to pay.
On other sites like Expedia, Orbitz, and Priceline, you are making the transaction with them directly and your contract is through them. They’re all good ones to go through, you just have to know who you’re contract is through when something wonky comes up.
The search engine that currently has all the travel blogger’s hearts aflutter is Momondo. Once you use it you can see why. It offers so many options, it’s really user friendly, and it consistently brings up the cheapest airfares.
+ or – 3 Days
This is a great tool to find cheap flights if you’re schedule is flexible. If you enable this feature in your search engine, a matrix will show you flight pricing for up to 3 days before and 3 days after the dates that you input. This way you can really see what days the cheapest flights are on.
Southwest Airlines
If you think just going on to a major matrix is the only way to find cheap flights, then let me tell you why you’re wrong. Southwest Airlines can only be booked through their own website. But what’s great about their website is their Low Fare Calendar, and it’s just what it sounds like, a calendar with low fares. Just find the date and fare that you want and book away. When you’re comparing prices to other air lines, remember that Southwest lets you check your first two bags for free, while the other airlines can charge up to $40 per bag. So, load up your two free checked bags and enjoy your vacation.
Are you using these tips because you’re flying to Cozumel for vacation? Then make sure that you check out our Perfect Five Day Itinerary.
Branded Credit Cards
This doesn’t get you cheap flights, it gets you practically free flights (you still need to pay the taxes). All of the major airlines have at least one branded credit card company that’ll give you miles for every dollar that you spend. Bonus, if you use them to book your flight they’ll usually let you check one bag free for each person that you buy tickets for. Bonus Bonus, if you spend a certain amount of money within the first three months they’ll spot you up to 60,000 miles. That’s the equivalent of two round trip domestic tickets.
Capital One Venture
This one is similar to a branded credit card, but it doesn’t lock you into just one airline. You rack up miles or points every time you use the card. Once you have enough points, you can go ahead and book your flight, pay with the Cap One card, and they will reimburse you for the cost of the tickets.
Budget Airlines/Basic Economy Fares on Major Airlines
Hey, what says cheap flights more that budget airlines? While the initial price might seem really low at first, that just gets you on the plane. You want to check bags? That’ll cost ya. You want to sit? Yeah, that’ll cost ya. You want to carry on? That’ll cost ya. You want the flight attendant to say hi to you? That’ll cost you too. I’m looking at you Frontier Airlines.
While I’m not a fan of budget airlines, some people love them, I feel that they are best for quick commutes when you have a small carry on. But beware, if for some reason the flight gets cancelled or the company decides to shut down (happens to the extreme budget carriers usually outside the U.S.) you could lose your money and they don’t have to put you on another flight.
Fly Into Another Airport
Another way to find cheap flights is to see if it’s cheaper to fly into a nearby airport. You have to be careful with this one though because it might be cheaper to fly into another airport, but other things might be more expensive. The rental car could cost more or the taxi/Uber extra cost might cancel out the savings. But sometimes it really works. At one time United and American were both at $500 RT Houston to Cozumel. Southwest’s Wanna Get Away fares were $90 each way to Cancun. After flying into Cancun, taking a private shuttle to the ferry in Playa Del Carmen, paying for the ferry, and taking a taxi from the ferry to the hotel, it was still half the cost of flying directly into Cozumel.
Instead of flying in to Key West you might save a lot of money by flying into Miami and enjoying the beautiful drive through the Keys.
Fly Off Season
This is a good way to find cheap flights if you’re not a slave to the typical family with kids schedule. Fly anywhere around the holidays or the middle of the summer, you’re going to be paying top dollar. Fly to Florida in September or October, the weather is sill nice and you’re not fighting for overhead luggage space with families with strollers. Want to get your ski fix in? Fly to Colorado in January or February It’s a little colder outside, but lift lines are short and airfares are cheaper.
Churning Credit Cards
These people are insane! They have spreadsheets so that they are aware of how much their spending on each card. This is the ultimate cheap flight. Every penny these people spend is done using a credit card. They’ll have three or four branded credit cards and put every expenditure on those cards. they do this until the yearly fee comes due, then they cancel the card and sign up for a new one. The key is to pay them off at the end of the month, and that’s where people get into trouble. They don’t pay them off and jack up their balances, and get caught in never ending spiral. Then they can’t cancel the card and have to pay the yearly dues.
Package Your Flight with A Hotel
Airlines, and vacation search engines all offer you discounts when you book both at the same time. Sometimes you can get deep discounts, but this is another area that you have to be flexible because they might not offer the specific hotel that you want.
Cheap Flight Fake News
There are a number of myths out there about finding cheap flights, so do yourself a favor and don’t fall for them. I’ve seen so many blogs pumping a myth that I know is wrong and it’s amazing how they get away with just putting out information that they’re too lazy to verify.
- Searching incognito – I fell for this one once and it’s all BS. I’ve had multiple windows open over multiple days and guess what? The pricing in the incognito mode and regular mode wasn’t any different. Websites are not set up to give you higher prices every time you do a search. So search away and you’ll eventually find that cheap flight.
- The best prices come out on Tuesday afternoon – Wrong! I don’t even think that the airlines themselves know when their algorithms are going to predict a fare sale.
- Websites that predict when to buy – You’ve seen that little box in the top left corner of Kayak predicting the future of the price. Yeah,it’s fake, it just a guess. Don’t believe it, if you’ve done you’re research like I told you above then you already know that.
Other Ways to Find Cheap Flights
There are other ways to find cheap flights that I didn’t cover because some things are more trouble than they’re worth.
- Sometimes you can find a cheap flight that has a layover in a city that you want to go to. So you buy a ticket to somewhere you don’t want to go to thinking you’ll just get off the plane at the layover city where you do want to go. It’s not worth it. Airlines frown on this and you can’t check any luggage, unless you want it to go to the final destination. Happy traveling luggage! Nice knowing ya!
- Flying multiple airlines on one trip. Yeah, make sure that you have all your connection times right or you might be stuck in an airport for hours because the two schedules didn’t match up and you missed that second flight, but don’t worry, airport food is notoriously cheap.
Follow these steps and you’ll be flying the friendly skies like a pro with a little extra cash in your wallet. And that pales in comparison to the thrill that you’ll get when you shut down your blueberry-vaping brother-in-law.
So you followed these steps and you found the super cheap flight to your dream destination, what hotel search engine are you going to use? Don’t worry, we’re not going to leave you out in the cold on that one either. Check out our post of hotel booking sites and you won’t go wrong.
