When going on holiday, booking flights can be one of the most expensive parts, especially, if you’re travelling long haul. Here are my five tips to help you find cheap flights and save some cash.
8 Ways To Find Cheap Flights
1. Book Early (But not too early)
Booking early is advisable, but book too early and you could miss out on the lowest prices, so finding that sweet spot is essential.
Generally speaking prices go up nearer the date of travel although if you’re prepared to risk leaving it until the minute you might be able to grab a bargain.
Flights are often released in batches and the cheapest will go first, so if you’re booking with a super budget airline keep an eye out.
2. Travel Midweek
Midweek flights are almost always cheaper, so if you can, booking a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday flight is likely to be cheaper, even in the school holidays.
This is also a great option if you’re going travelling and are on a limited budget, plan your travel around flying midweek.
3. Beware of the Extras
Companies that offer very cheap flights are notorious for adding lots of extras. What starts out as cheap flight can soon become a similar price to what you would usually pay when you add on luggage, inflight meals and other hidden costs.
4. Choose a Flight With A Layover
This is something we did when we travelled to the USA for our honeymoon a few years ago. Often flights that have a stopover at another airport are cheaper. I would recommend taking this option on your outbound flight rather than the return flight, when all you want to do is get home.
While doing this did save us a couple of hundred pounds, it was exhausting an added around six hours to an already long travel time. Unless the savings were significant, I’m not sure it’s something we would opt to do again when travelling long-haul. If we were travelling domestically, it might be a different matter.
I think it all depends on how much you value your time against how much money is being saved.
5. Use Flight Comparison Website
Flight comparison websites are a great way to compare prices for flights to find the cheapest. I’ve listed a few of my favourite ones below.
It’s worth always checking whether booking direct would be cheaper too.
6. Find Cheap Flights: Try A Different Browser
If you’ve been searching for a flight for several days, hoping that the cost will go down or looking at different date combos, try changing your browser.
Airline websites and flight comparison sites use cookies to monitor behavior and you might see flight prices start to sneak up. Either clear your browsing history or switch to a different browser.
If you’ve been doing a lot of searching across different websites, don’t forget to close everything before actually booking to avoid any mix ups.
7. Package Vs. Booking Yourself
When booking a holiday, it’s worth checking whether a package version would be cheaper than booking each element separately yourself. This will depend on the type of holiday you’re planning on taking.
In my experience, package holidays to European summer sun destinations such as Spain and Portugal are cheaper, whereas when visiting the USA it’s often cheaper to book things yourself.
You could also consider booking a very cheap mystery holiday where everything is booked for you, including flights, but you don’t find out where you are going until you reach the airport.
8. Be Flexible
The more flexible you can be with the date, day and time of your flight, the more likely you’ll be to find a bargain. This also applies to your destination – if you can choose between different cities and airports you can choose the cheapest flights available.
You’ll also want to consider the cost of getting to and from the airport and compare this against any potential savings.
Do you have any more tips for finding cheap flights?
