My favorite sites to get cheap flights?
This is a simplified version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5I0PBfAmZU
Having the ability to find cheap flights is a great skill to have because it maximizes your flexibility if you are on a budget. Here I’ll be teaching you how to find one step-by-step.
- Go to incognito mode for Google Chrome, because airfare sites can track your search results and raise the ticket price for wherever you were searching for.
- If you can go anywhere with any given flexible dates, check the below sites for any special offers or crazy cheap mistake fares.
- If you want to go to a specific region at some given month (only for departing from the U.S.), use Google Flights Explore. Note that this is different from Google Flights, and not a known tool for the public. GFE gives you the options to land at a specific region, so you can compare the prices of landing on different countries all at once. Although it is currently only available for those leaving the U.S., it is by for the easiest tool to get a quick search.
- If you want to dig in more advanced stuff, use Google’s ITA matrix, which lets you to customize your routes specifically, and gives you a baseline of the price for which to pay.
- Use these sites to find tickets if you are not departing from the U.S.:
- If you are with any frequent flyer programs, you want to do these 2 things:
- Fly with the company with which you’ll get extra miles, obviously.
- If you want to use your reward miles, check the miles needed to make a flight on milez.biz, and calculate the value of price per mile (ticket price/miles required to fly). General rule of thumb is if the ticket costs less than 1 cent per mile, then buy the ticket with your own money and save the reward miles for later.
- Once you’ve found the cheapest ticket available for your needs, check the availability on Flight Centre. If your deal is cheaper, save the deal and call Flight Centre, because they claim to have the “Lowest Airfare Guarantee” and “won’t be beaten on price and will beat any comparable quote.” If you are interested in taking advantage of this so-called grantee, search it up on Google to see who else offers the deal. This works especially well if you booked a mistake fare.
Note:
- You’ll be likely to find cheaper tickets 330 days before, or 6 weeks within, and leaving on Tuesdays/Wednesdays will be your best bet.
- Make sure to do the research on the site you are purchasing the ticket with to avoid any scams. Always book a flight from the direct carrier than 3rd party sites if you can (except for error fairs!).