Do you want to see the world without breaking the bank, but you are unsure where to start? If yes, this article is for you.
Keeping an open mind about where you want to go is a great way to find good deals on flights, but if you already know where and when you want to go, the strategy for buying flights is different. The answer to the question, ‘How do I find the best deals on flights?’ depends on the kind of trip you want to book. Here I will show you four different ways of finding a cheap flight.
I am Canadian, so the websites I recommend are the ones that I think are the best for searching for flights from Canada. These methods will likely work for anyone but if you are from elsewhere, you may have other popular websites that you should check that I wouldn’t list. For example, I see a lot of American travellers recommending to use Kayak.com, but I don’t recommend this website for Canadians because every time I look the prices have been significantly higher than it’s competition.
One thing that applies to all of these methods of booking flights… clear your cookies and search in Incognito mode before searching.
Option 1: Buying Flights for Undecided Dates and Location
Strategy: Speed & Flexibility
Being flexible with your location and dates will get you the most bang for your buck. It is also a great place to discover new and interesting cities that you may have never gone to otherwise. To find the best prices you want to search for flights available to all destinations for any time.
I love this method of booking flights. I did this for my last vacation to China and I ended up finding a great flight to a city named Chongqing. I had never heard of this city before and I would not have gone there otherwise, but it ended up being the best vacation I have ever planned. One thing I want to point out is that there is something incredible to see and experience in every corner of the world and so the destination you chose doesn’t matter so much as what you chose to do when you get there.
Whenever I am looking for inspiration for my next trip, I usually start on Skyscanner. I like this website because it can find you the cheapest flights to anywhere departing on any month. It’s a great starting point to figure out the cheapest month to depart, how far ahead you should book, when you should go, or where you should go for deals.
My newest obsession, however, is kiwi.com. I like this one more than Skyscanner because it has the added bonus of being able to put in a range of days that you want to travel for. So if you only want to go on a trip for 10-14 days, Kiwi.com will let you search this way, whereas with Skyscanner you end up sacrificing on prices to fit the date range you need. I have not used Kiwi.com yet, but I definitely will for my next vacation.
For example, while getting these screenshot I found a flight from Edmonton to Tokyo for $516CAD on Kiwi. When searching Skyscanner, I found slightly lower prices for more cities in Japan, but the best departure/return dates were months apart. After selecting the city of Osaka and picking my dates, the great price I saw initially on Skyscanner disappeared. Whereas on Kiwi, the prices stayed and I could book the flights right away for convenience. Kiwi also has a guarantee in case something goes wrong, even if the flights are through separate airlines. So if I was actually planning a vacation for this year, I probably would have hopped on to this deal.
Google Flights is another great option for searching for flights by a range of dates. Their explore feature allows you to search for trips with a 1 or 2 week itinerary for any dates within the next 6 months. I love google flights, but it’s not always the best search engine. For example, although I am doing a similar search to the one I did on Kiwi.com, Google isn’t finding me that same $516 flight to Tokyo that Kiwi did.
I recommend trying all three sites and seeing what you find.
If you aren’t that enthused about any of the destinations you can afford… try again a different day! This is the advantage of being flexible.
If you see tempting destination options for good prices (which you should), pick a couple destinations from this list that interest you, and drill down until it gives you the flight offerings.
Before booking it’s important to do a few quick online searches about each chosen city. Example, “Why should I visit Osaka, Japan?”, “Average weather Costa Rica January.”. “Average Cost to travel to Zurich”, etc. You want to get a rough idea of weather, costs to expect, travel Visa information, as well as some attractions before making the decision on where to go. Otherwise, you might save $300 on a flight… but end up paying $350 for a Visa, or get there and find out that the cost of food and accommodations is so high, that the flight savings are negligible.
For additional savings, you can take the flight information you found for the flights and check the airlines directly for deals, or plugin those same dates in another search engine like Flighthub.
By this time, one of the destinations should be standing out to you. If the price is right, go with your intuition and book right away. Don’t wait. That amazing flight to Tokyo I found? One hour later, the price changed to over $1300. By the next day, all flight prices to Japan were back to being over $1000. So I cannot stress this enough, if you are doing this method, time is money, and book within a few hours if you find a deal you like.
Flight prices change every day and the last thing you want to do it get all excited about a destination, only to lose hundreds of dollars in savings by waiting to book the flight at a later date or time.
If you do decide to wait for a specific destination, the price fluctuation isn’t always that extreme. If you pick a destination with prices close to the average you can probably afford to wait a few days. For example, on my last vacation, my boyfriend and I booked our flight to Chongqing a couple days after we initially found the flight. Originally, the flight was about $650 and we booked similar flights for about $730 round trip. Yes, $80 is a fairly significant amount of money to lose, but in the grand scheme of things… it’s still cheaper than it would have been if we booked the flights only to find out that that we can’t have those days off. My parents and Aunts snagged flights a couple weeks later from Winnipeg for about $850.
Option 2: Specific Location and Dates
Strategy: Price Monitoring
Alright, you know where you want to go, and you know when you need to be there. Your goal for this method should not be to find the cheapest price, but a good price that you are willing to pay. This is because finding the cheapest flight that will be made available for a specific date and time is nearly impossible.
Airlines have many tools available to them to know when to offer what prices and their algorithms change constantly, so it’s hard to predict when the cheapest flight will be available for specific locations and specific dates. Your best bet is to look at average prices, pick a goal price you are willing to pay, monitor the flights, and then when the prices touch your goal, book.
Be sensible with your goal. Google flights has a nice tool that will show you the average prices for your trip. If the lowest price is $750, don’t wait for a flight at $700. Even the lowest price of $750 for a specific flight will be really difficult to catch. You probably won’t find those prices when booking specifically. Even using this handy tool, you will never know when the cheapest price for those dates will be made available. Most people don’t recognize that point when they see it and wait for too long before booking. Waiting until the last minute is the worst way to book specific flights and may even screw you over. The best, more direct flights for popular destinations will get filled far in advance.
For example, after I search on Google Flights for flights to Sao Paulo on the days I want, Google tells me that my price of $896 is on the lower end of typical prices for the trip I selected, but that the cheapest price I can get these days is $790. In this case, because it is on the lower end of the scale… I would probably book. Anything under $1000 to go to Brazil is a great price for me.
I would love to give you a general rule of thumb on how far ahead to book flights, but every site seems to say something different. The best time to book fluctuates every year and it depends on the destinations and dates you are booking. I recommend googling “best time to book a flight to X location from Y” to find your answers, websites like Skyscanner and Cheap-O-Air will sometimes put out articles like this with their findings on the best time to book flights by location. Try to find the most recent articles, but remember that these are just historical averages to use as a guideline. If everyone else is doing this and booking those weeks, then the algorithm will change and that will no longer be the best time to book.
About 6 months before any trip, I recommend setting flight alert notifications on google flights. Google alerts can let you know when flight prices change so that you stay up to date with the latest pricing. Also, by signing up for airline subscription emails you will get sent promo coupons and alerts of any member-only sales, oftentimes giving you an extra 15-30 % off the regular sales price.
If you don’t want to get a bunch of junk mail, you can also check Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to learn of the promo codes being offered. However, don’t wait around for those promo codes to hit your inbox before buying. Because when you have specific dates to fly on, those amazing deals are unlikely to come along when you need it. You are better off booking earlier at regular prices early rather than waiting for 15% off an inflated price. So focus on the price monitoring and book when prices hit your price. If they don’t match your goal at 4-6 weeks prior, book anyway. If you wait any longer than 4 weeks before your trip, you play a dangerous game and will likely pay for way more than you bargained for.
Personally, I just let the airline email subscriptions passively accumulate in my junk inbox and then when the prices I want are being offered online, I search for that airline in my inbox to see if any promo codes exist for additional saving that can be had on my price.
Options 3: Specific location but uncertain dates
Strategy: Patience
Having flexible dates gives you a fair bit of power in finding the price you want. In general, if you are willing to go to Mexico on say Tuesday, January 14th rather than during Christmas break you will find much better prices. Being flexible with dates gives you quite a bit of power in picking your price, and the broader your search, the better prices you can find.
Try to aim for a trip in the Spring or Fall, as these will be the less expensive months to fly. January also happens to be the best month to search for cheap flights if you want to go somewhere in the Spring.
When booking flights in this scenario, your strategy should be patience. This is the one strategy where you can wait for those amazing deals in your inbox. Just like in option 1, I recommend that you start by searching for the Cheapest Month to travel to your destination on Skyscanner, Google Flights, or Kiwi, but instead of destination “Everywhere” put the destination you wish to go to and any cities around it.
For, example, using Google flights I can search for all flights to Brazil within the next six months. I can see that Air Canada flies to Sao Paulo, so I would subscribe to their mailing list and follow them on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. You want to keep an eye out for special sales like 30% off all flights. Based on this search I can see that March has the best prices to fly to Brazil, any flight for under $1000 is pretty good for Brazil, if I were extremely thirsty to go, I might book these. However, I have a lot of time and I want to get the BEST price… so I could also wait for a sale with AirCanada to hit my inbox or check again every couple days and see if prices dip even lower. Once you find a great price, book.
Another trick is to not only search for prices to the city you are going to but also the cities and countries nearby. For example, if my goal is to go to Belize to learn how to Scuba Dive, I wouldn’t just look up flights to Belize… I would also search for flights to Cancun because it is just north of Belize and Mexico has direct flights right from Edmonton. Once in Mexico, I can take a bus to Belize for about $60 that will likely be cheaper than the airfare difference. Bonus, I get to visit two countries!
Alternatively, flying to Paris (or anywhere else in Europe) is generally more expensive than flying to London from Edmonton. So, when going to a European city look at flights to all of Europe and then research budget flights, buses, or train rides to get to your final destination separately. Europe has some great discounts with budget airlines like Ryanair and EasyJet and you will often save money by doing this (as long as you can comply with baggage restrictions). When I studied abroad in La Rochelle in 2013, I flew in and out of London and travelled via train to La Rochelle.
The more patient you are, the better deal you can find. Just maybe don’t wait around for a whole year for a price that doesn’t exist. You will only know after the fact if a price was the best price, so do your research and find out what kind of prices are possible for that destination.
Option 4: Specific Dates with an Uncertain location
Strategy: Book Earlier, but not too early
Alright, spring break is coming up and you want to go somewhere, anywhere.
To find the best flight, about 2-5 months before your date, search for flights to “Anywhere” for your dates in Google Flights, Skyscanner, and/or Kiwi. Around the 4 month zone, flights that have not sold will start offering out lower pricing, so search at around this time, pick the cheapest/most attractive destination and book.
If you don’t find something amazing, sign up for a few travel alerts for destinations that interest you, monitor it for a couple weeks and see if average prices are going up or down. If prices are going up it means the cheap tickets are starting to sell out, so it might be better to book now, if prices lowered a bit, you might be able to wait… but don’t wait any longer than a month before.
If the dates you selected fall on some kind of student break, holiday, or long weekend… you might want to book in the 4-month zone and wait no longer than 2 months before. Flights on those dates will sell out quicker than other dates, and prices will likely remain higher than average.
Save.Love.Travel 