In my circle of friends, I am known as the budget traveler, a point of pride with me. I have a long list of cheap trips under my belt, and I love talking travel with whoever wants to listen, and not only to encourage them to travel often but to consider doing it cheaply. If someone wants to stay at the Ritz, I don’t discourage them, but most people think they can’t afford travel and don’t know how to find bargains, and therefore often decide to stay home. But you don’t need to be confined to your home, in my opinion. If you know how to find good deals, you can travel more often, stay longer at your destination, or actually take that distant trip you’ve been pining for.
How To Book Cheap Flights & Air Travel Deals
The first step in affordable travel is to find budget airfares. Prior to the internet, I would spend hours planning a trip, calling airline after airline, shopping for tickets for days, shifting around my travel schedule, and checking flights at different hours — all to find the cheapest flight. Luckily, I enjoyed this game and usually came up with some remarkably good prices.
Now you can do the same thing at lightning speed using aggregators, which come up with the cheapest flight with a just a few clicks on the computer. Here are a few of the best travel sites for bargain seekers, in my opinion:
Travelocity: I’ve found great bargains on Travelocity, which is a popular site for travelers who are seeking out discounted airline tickets, rentals, cruises, tour packages and such. They are pretty recognizable, thanks to their famous mascot, the Travel Gnome, which you’ll find frequently featured in the reality show “The Amazing Race”. It’s a great place to stop by when you’re looking for travel resources. Check out the Travelocity site here.
Priceline.com: it’s a big site that’s known to all, thanks to their famous spokesperson William Shatner. They’ve got an interesting feature called Name Your Price, which allows you to pick up some great deals on travel through a bidding process. The catch is that you may have to make some tradeoffs when you decide to take the deal you are offered. We wrote about this in more detail in our Name Your Price with Priceline review. Check out the Priceline site here.
Expedia.com: Another good place to check is Expedia, which is packed to the gills with everything on travel. They’ve got a section called “Deals & Offers” which you should check out for sales and discounts on vacation packages, flights, hotels, cars and cruises. Take a look at this section first and you’ll encounter lots of savings. Check out the Expedia.com site here.
So how do these travel sites work? They all have similar features and functionality. Log on to one of these sites and enter your departing and arriving cities and dates of travel. Up pops a variety of airlines, with different times of travel, and the lowest prices listed first. Just scroll down until you see a price you can afford, with the corresponding time of day you want to fly and the number of flight connections. Next step is to choose your return flight. Then, click and buy!
Most of the time, I’ve noted that the different aggregators offer the same airlines, prices, and flight times, but that may not always be the case. Here are some rules of thumb when it comes to landing a cheap flight:
- Use airline credit cards that offer rewards points towards your tickets. It’s one more way to bring down the cost of your airfare.
- The earlier you buy your ticket, the cheaper it will be. Conversely, you can sign up with airlines for their last minute flight bargains and get some excellent deals that way too.
- Slower times of the week (mid-week, mid-day) tend to be cheaper than Monday mornings and Friday afternoons (prime time business travel).
- If you are flexible with your travel dates, or with using alternate nearby airports, you can usually get better fares.
- Slower times of the year (holidays, not summer) are cheaper times to fly.
- Flying off season (summer at a winter ski resort, for example) will cost less.
- Check airfares several times a day, with early morning the most likely time to grab a cheap fare.
- Check out charter flights and vacation packages, as sometimes these are cheaper than the commercial flights.
Contributing Writer: BEM
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey there!
I would like to include another site called Momondo.com, that searches along with expedia, another 700 hundred sites with information about cheap flights, hotels, car rentals, including green train trips on certain routes.
SVB as always giving great advice, I came to “discover” just recently that if you are awake early enough, between 1 am and 3 am you definitely are going to find really great prices. Just be aware of the fine print regarding cancellations and changes, so make sure before you book you are committed to travel on that date and time.
I always look at kayak.com when looking for flights since it aggregates a lot of sites into one.
The only thing I would add is that you should routinely clear your cookies since these sites know what when you looked and at what price so they jack up the price just a little bit to make you feel rushed.
I’ve heard good things about Kayak, too. But Priceline has never steered me wrong for hotels. I stayed at the Algonquin Hotel in New York for a ridiculously low price.
I’m curious about Neal’s comment (#2), though: If you’re up at 1am, where should you go to get these deals? Do tell!
Interesting feedback… particularly the one from Evan. I wouldn’t know how to verify whether a site has jacked up the price based on cookies or whether it’s just demand, but I did find this article about this alleged practice. Highly intriguing — this scheme on using cookies.
I’ve worked at many places as a systems and applications engineer and never heard of anything similar to this.
Awesome! I’m looking forward to traveling more in 2010, so I’ll have to bookmark this post too! Thanks!
Some great tips. I guess with most things, all it takes is a little bit of effort, planning ahead to get great deals.
I heard that they are giving discounts for those not wearing explosive pants.
Here’s a great tip for anyone booking with UK airline Easyjet – you can avoid their £12.50 admin fee per ticket by paying with a Pre-paid Mastercard (just changed from Visa Electron). You can actually get a one-way flight for 99p including taxes doing this, compared to paying £13.50 for the same ticket with a normal credit or debit card.
Also, don’t forget to pre-book parking if you’re planning to drive to the airport at a site like this — more money saved!
If you are absolutely certain (and by absolutely, I mean 100% solidly sure) of the dates you are traveling, you can often save some significant money by booking a non-refundable ticket. If you cancel before the scheduled flight time, you MAY be able to use the ticket for a later flight on the same carrier. But my experience is the airlines seem to be getting a bit less flexible in this regard, so buyer beware.
Just remember, non-refundable tickets are a risk. Even when you know the dates are solid, life happens sometimes. Ask yourself are you prepared to accept the risk before pulling the trigger on a non-refundable ticket.
Best,
Len
Len Penzo dot Com
Len Penzo dot Com
These online bookings from the travel services are really helpful, as since the chances of waiting for long hours in the queue gets reduce and also you get some good discounts if you book tickets in bulk and thus the technology has really made us more advancements where in mobile booking for the online tickets are introduced now.
Let’s add Farecast to that list. Although even if I do use a travel-aggregator site — I always perform due diligence and check the actual airline site to compare price and flight times. But bundles seem to be the way to go this season. I myself am spreading the word about JetBlue and Hertz. Offering daily prizes as well as $25 vouchers on car rentals.
Always looking for the next great travel reward!