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10 Tips for Saving Money on Flights

Everyone should travel, but not everyone can afford expensive flights. Here are a few tips on how you can save money.

By Nathalia SilvaPublished 5 years ago 3 min read
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You don't need to be rich to travel you just need to find the right ticket. You might have to sacrifice on comfort and perks, but its worth it if you just need a ticket to get you from points A to B.

1. Keep Your Flight Searches A Secret

Websites will monitor your activity on their site and increase prices if they see you searching for the same price more than once they will raise prices. This is to scare you into buying now to avoid further price increases. The websites use cookies in your browser to track you, so always search for flights in incognito or private browsing mode to see the lowest prices.

2. Use Flight Search Engines

You should never go directly to an airlines website to book tickets. You will never been shown the best deals and you might miss out on cheap tickets from new discount airlines that you have never heard of before. Here are a few recommended flight search engines.

  • Kayak
  • SkyScanner
  • Google Flights

3. Flight During Off-Times

Most people travel in June and August because school is out and families want to go away for the summer. Holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas are also very busy. The best time to fly is usually in-between these busy times. Websites like SkyScanner can make this easy to do because they will show you the price of a flight for an entire month.

4. Use Different Airports

The closest airport is not always the best airport to fly to and from. Even if you have to take a bus/train out of the city to get to an airport, it's worth it to save a couple hundred dollars. When searching on websites like Kayak you can choose an option to include nearby airports and that will help you find the best airports to fly to and from.

5. Fly on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays

These are the three best days to fly because they are not at the start of a week or weekend. People will usually leave on a Monday and stay the whole week or they will leave on a Friday and stay a weekend. If you can travel during off-peak days you will save a lot.

6. Use Skiplagged To Find Hidden Prices

With Skiplagged you can find really cheap tickets by using a little known "hidden-city" trick. Instead of booking a costly non-stop flight from Hartford to Charlotte, book a cheaper flight from Hartford to Atlanta, with a layover in Charlotte, and then simply stroll off the plane in North Carolina. This doesn't work if you book a round trip or if you check-in luggage.

7. Buy Two One-way Tickets

Round trip tickets are not always cheaper. If you buy two one-way tickets with different airlines you would be surprised just how much you can save sometimes. This is why it's a good idea to use flight search engines when booking tickets. You can look at one-way tickets in both directions and find a really cheap flight.

8. Look For "Hacker Fares"

The idea behind "hacker fares" is to find a cheap flight by buying two different tickets. The first will be from your stating destination to some other destination and the second will be from the other destination to your ending destination. For example, if you want to fly to Casbalanca, you could book a ticket from New York City to London and then book another ticket from London to Casbalanca. Since NYC and London have dozens of flights a day you can find a really cheap ticket across the Atlantic. Once you are in Europe you can find a discount airline to fly you the last leg of the journey. If you're not in a hurry you can even spend a day in the "middle destination" city.

9. Use Flight Alerts To Find Discount Fares

If you use a website like Airfarewatchdog or SkyScanner you will find an option to alert you if there are drops in the price. This is a great way of finding accidental fares and flash sales. If you have some time or are just hoping to get lucky it doesn't hurt to set-up an alert and hope you get a notification for a super cheap flight.

10. Use Credit Card Points To Travel

When you open a new credit card it can usually come with a very large sign-up bonus. These bonuses are an excellent way to score a "free" flight anywhere you want. While you will have to meet some kind of spending requirement to get the bonuses, you can usually meet it if you just use the card to pay your monthly bills. Use websites like NerdWallet to help you find deals on travel credit cards.

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