One of the most asked questions I receive is how to find cheap flights when I travel? It’s the most critical in your overall budget when traveling. Therefore, making it important to find cheap flights in order to travel more frequently. There are a number of ways and in this blog, I will show you the best sites to use to find cheap flights so you can travel more!
First and foremost, if you want to book cheap flights, most of the time, you’re going to need to travel during low tourist seasons. Below I’ve outlined the lowest travel seasons for certain continents.
Traveling During Non Peak Seasons
Typically, everyone wants to travel during the summer because it’s the best season to travel. However, the rates are at their highest during peak season so opt to travel during cooler months where the weather is still bearable but crowds are at a low. Below are the peak seasons for each continent.
Europe is usually busiest from May-October
Australia and South America high season is December-March
Asia high season is from July-September
North America high season is June-September
Central America December-March
Search for Flights in an Incognito Window
Certain websites will see you continually searching for a site and raise the prices overnight to have you book more rapidly. How rude?! Most people see this and fear the price will rise even higher so they book the tickets right away. A good rule of thumb is to search your flights in private or incognito mode to trick the robots and find those flight deals!
Find The Best Days to Fly
Usually, mid-week is the cheapest time to fly. I always fly out on a Tuesday or Wednesday and find that flights are the least expensive on those days.
For the 9-5 travelers, weekends are crucial for travel. Some tips for booking flights on weekend days are:
- Book months in advance (4-6 months should be a good rule of thumb)
- Use a price tracker – there are many sites to use this tool with and I’ve gone into more detail with the travel sites below. They all have great tools in order to keep an eye on your flight prices. I would start looking nine months out and book six months out for weekend travel to get the best prices.
The Best Flight Search Engines
Kayak
The OG of travel sites. I’ve been using this one for years and the features are great. The best one is the flight price tracker. Pictured below you can search the flight and it will show you the estimated price fare for the months to come. It even predicts the best time to buy so you can be sure you’re getting the best deals.
You can also set up price alerts and they send them straight to your email daily or weekly. I typically use this site for domestic travel.
Skyscanner
This is my personal favorite to book cheap flights to Europe. I especially love the search everywhere tool where I go into detail below. Skyscanner makes it easy to find cheap flights + hotels around the world. Whenever I want to travel internationally, I search using Skyscanner and find the cheapest month to travel.
As you can see above, I searched for flights from San Diego to Rome and the cheapest month that I can travel to Italy is in November 2020. This is currently nine months out so I will start tracking these prices and plan to buy them a couple of months from now.
Google Flights
The newest of the group and taking the search engines by storm. They don’t mess around with the emails though. Whenever you search for a flight and don’t purchase, they send you reminders almost daily about the flight increase/decrease. This bothers me so I tend to not use them a lot however, I have many friends who swear by this engine as the almighty.
Search for the Cheapest Places to Fly
If you have no itinerary and are spontaneous then consider searching by the cheapest places to fly. The easiest way to do this is by using the Skyscanner “fly everywhere” feature. Pictured below you’ll see the search screen and the place to click “search everywhere” and hit the cheapest month on the top.
You’ll then be prompted to another screen with all of the lowest flights. As you can see you can fly as to a city in the United States for as low as $53. What a steal! Obviously, it is going to vary by the city you are departing from. Larger airports tend to have cheaper flights.
Become Part of a Loyalty Program
If you are a frequent flyer like myself it helps tremendously to becoime part of a loyalty program. Although it takes some time to build up miles, here are some tips in making the most of your loyalty program:
- Open a Travel Credit Card and use it for EVERYTHING (you’ll be surprised how many miles you can accrue by using your card to pay bills, restaurants, gas, etc.)
- Most programs offer companion certificates which means a +1 camn fly free with you once a year
- The benefits for the Delta Skymiles Card I’ve found are the best. In just 3 years I reached Platinum Medallion Status which means I get complimentary upgrades, access to the Delta Lounges, Companion Certificates, and more.
- Click here to open your Delta SkyMiles account and start accruing miles for everyday purchases
- Stick to flying that one airline for all your flights. The prices may sometimes be more then picking the cheapest airline available but I promise youi, the benefits outweigh the prices.
Thanks for reading my advice on “The Best Practices on How to Find Cheap Flights”. I hope you gained some insight into booking your travels and you’re able to travel more! For more of our travel guides head here.
XO,
Courtney
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