So you’re not a regular traveler who piles up frequent-flier miles and loyalty points. You won’t be joining any million-mile society.
You’re not enrolled in some carrier’s Elite Premier Advantage Gold AirMiles Alliance Priority Rewards plan. You’re not a globe-trotting airfare ninja who can pull off a fare trick and hop a flight to Abu Dhabi for the price of a candy bar.
We understand. You don’t travel all the time. You just need to buy a ticket. How do you secure the best possible price?
It can feel overwhelming. Airfares are rising this year. With countless travel sites and so many “booking hacks” circulating, it’s tricky to know where to begin.
We’ve got you covered. We’ve gathered the latest tactics, data, websites and mobile apps for uncovering the cheapest fares. They could substantially lower what you pay.
First, a disclaimer: There isn’t a single site that always offers the lowest price. It just doesn’t work that way.
“Everyone else would be bankrupt overnight,” travel authority Gilbert Ott tells London’s Daily Mail in a recent piece debunking booking myths. “Not every site shows all carriers or fares, and occasionally one underbids its rivals.”
Our takeaway: Reserve early. Avoid buying tickets on a Friday. Be as flexible as your schedule allows. And try several digital tools to hunt down the best prices.
Below is our stepwise plan for nabbing very cheap flights:
Decide When You’ll Travel
There’s a reason most of us return from trips on Sunday. Vacation is over, and we have to drag ourselves back to the grind.
But if you can be flexible, try not to fly on Sunday. It usually costs more.
Analysis from MarketWatch and the Hopper app found you’ll typically pay about 10% more to fly on a Sunday. They reported the average round-trip domestic fare was $264 on Sundays versus $241 on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
The season: The same study discovered you’ll pay roughly 30% more to fly in July or December compared with the cheapest months.
It comes down to supply and demand. Average fares were roughly $360 in December and July, versus about $280 in January, February and April. There’s a month-by-month chart you can review here.
Which Day NOT to Buy Tickets
You may have heard, “Always buy plane tickets on Tuesday.” Don’t fall for that blanket advice.
“There’s no magic day,” Ott writes. “If there were, no one would ever purchase tickets any other day.”
That said, avoid purchasing tickets on Friday. The Wall Street Journal discovered that fares bought on Friday are often about 13% higher than on Sunday.
Why? Because fare sales often end by Friday. The low-cost seats sell out during the week. And carriers raise prices late in the week to see if rivals will match them over the weekend.
Your safest move might be to shop over the weekend. “Knowing that many price-sensitive travelers browse on weekends, airlines sometimes post their lowest fares on Saturdays and Sundays,” the WSJ noted.
Still, this isn’t a foolproof rule. “There are far too many variables for simple tips like ‘buy on Sunday’ or ‘buy on Tuesday’ to hold universally,” Time magazine reports.
Book Early, But Not Too Far Ahead
Reserve early. “The sweet spot is about two months before travel,” the WSJ reports. It says the best fares for North American flights typically sell about 57 days in advance. Travel site CheapAir places it at 54 days, with the week before and after that 54-day window being prime time to buy.
That’s good general advice, but when should you actually buy for your trip? For tailored guidance, try the tool CheapAir launched last year. Using historical trends, it recommends how many days ahead to book for your particular destination.
Don’t purchase way too early, but don’t procrastinate either. “Booking too early is often poor; booking too late is likely worse,” Time magazine warns.
Armed with that guidance,set up a fare alertby entering your route and dates on the Hopper app or on a site like Airfare Watchdog.
Hopper forecasts whether prices on a route will rise or fall and notifies you when the fare drops to its likely low point. Naturally, some cheap options are red-eyes or include long layovers, which you might want to avoid. So in late 2016, Hopper added filters to exclude stops, long layovers and stripped-down unbundled fares from results.
Airfare Watchdog scans carrier sites for specials and emails you deal alerts.
Use Google Flights
One of the best online tools for scoring very cheap tickets is Google Flights. When planning a trip, it gives you the ability to check lots ofdates, times and airports quickly.
When advice site Lifehacker polled readers about favorite booking sites in 2016, nearly half picked Google Flights, applauding its intuitive design.
It lets you:
- Search for round-trip or one-way fares.
- Pick economy, business or first-class seats.
- Select a preferred carrier.
- Filter out red-eye flights if desired.
- Check whether flying into a nearby airport would be cheaper.
- See how much you save by flying later in the day or on a different date.
Once you select a flight, Google directs you to that airline to complete your purchase.
Explore Other Online Options
Before you hit “buy,” look around at competing travel sites. There are big names like Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity and Priceline, but don’t ignore smaller players. Here are several lesser-known services that offer different advantages:
Hipmunk: Similar to Google Flights, it’s a straightforward, free search engine. Rather than long lists of text, its attractive interface visually shows departure and arrival times while comparing flights. It ranks results using a metric called “agony” — a blend of cost, trip length and stops — and syncs with Google Calendar.
Skyscanner: Another flight comparison engine that also searches hotels and rental cars. It’s a price aggregator, not a booking platform. It’s especially handy for checking whether mixing different airlines and connections might be cheaper.
ITA Matrix: This is a Savinly favorite. It’s why Google bought the company to power Google Flights. Today, ITA’s interface is a more advanced variant of Google Flights, with interactive features for experienced travelers. It’s simple to scan fares across a 30-day window if your trip is within the next month.
Skiplagged: Dubbed “a hacker’s delight,” it uncovers very cheap fares by finding one-way tickets that have a layover at the airport you want to reach. This works best if you travel without checked luggage, because checked bags would continue to the flight’s final stop.
Kayak: Like Google Flights, it lets you compare fares for multiple airports simultaneously. (Would flying into Miami or Fort Lauderdale be cheaper? Long Beach or LAX?) Unlike Google Flights, you can book directly through Kayak.
Momondo: This engine includes independent carriers such as Southwest that some other search engines omit.
Scott’s Cheap Flights: Helpful for spotting mistake fares and flash sales.
Check Budget Carriers
It’s worth considering low-cost carriers like Frontier, Spirit and Allegiant, provided you accept a few caveats.
They don’t serve as many airports as major carriers. And while base fares are low, they recoup revenue with higher ancillary fees.You’ll pay extra for carry-ons, seat assignments, onboard food and even bottled water. Expect limited legroom, too.
Allegiant often flies to smaller, secondary airports, so check exactly how far that airport is from your final destination.
Remember: Checked Bags Add to the Price
When comparing options, include the total trip cost. That means factoring in baggage fees.
Ideally, avoid checking luggage and travel light with carry-ons only.Here are tips to make that feasible.
If you can’t avoid checked bags, know the typical charges: most major airlines impose $25 each way for a first checked bag and $35 for a second.
Among major carriers, JetBlue allows one checked bag free for some fares, and Southwest includes two checked bags at no additional cost.
Join a Loyalty Program
Once you start finding lower fares, you may discover travel is more affordable than you thought. You might begin flying more often.
And before you know it, you could be accruing frequent-flyer miles.
That’s a separate topic altogether.
Your Turn: Which travel site do you use most, and why?
