Finding the cheapest flight ticket can always take a lot of time and patience. Either for your normal shorter vacation or your travel around the world, flights are often the most expensive part of your journey. Especially for long-term travelling people, which are flying often but need to save money at the same time, it is important to know how to find cheap flights.
On many pages you can find information like:
If you book a flight on a Tuesday or actually flying on a Wednesday will be the cheapest. And deleting your cookies or using an incognito tab will lead you as well to cheaper airfares.
After booking many flights over the last years in Asia, Europe, America and Australia I can’t confirm that!
My flight search observations
- Personally, I have figured out that the most important thing is that you are flexible on the date and time you are flying.
- Delete your cookies or use an incognito tab doesn’t show you cheaper flights.
- It’s true that most of the time flights during the week are cheaper than on a weekend (but that doesn’t mean Wednesday is the best day to fly!).
- If you can avoid the high season from your vacation or travel destination it helps you as well to save money on flight prices (and accommodation as well).
- In case you have your fix travel dates, you might be flexible with your destination. Nowadays with all the flight search engines, as listed below, it’s very easy and convenient to search for cheap flights.
- With Skyscanner you can enter your dates you want to fly and only your departure city. As destination you can enter “everywhere” and search for flights. Skyscanner will show you now all the countries and cities around the world, sorted with the cheapest destination and flights on top.
- Book long distance flight legs separately. Sometimes you can get better deals if you book two long-haul flights separately rather than booking all-in-one with the same airline or within the same search on a flight search engine.
- If you are more than 1 person, book every flight for each person separately. That way the price will stay low. Often if you enter 2 or more people, the price is rising.
- Use different flight search engines.
- Fly with budget airlines.
Flight Search Engines
Nowadays, there are many flight search engines in the internet. It’s definitely a must to use one to find cheap flights. But to be sure, you should always check a second flight search engine. And after you have found the cheapest flight/airline via the search engine you should always go to the airline webpage itself to check if it is the same price there. Sometimes it’s cheaper on the airline page (because of no additional baggage fees on example) and sometimes it’s cheaper via a search engine as you can get some booking discounts.
KAYAK & eDreams
In general with Kayak, I personally have found the cheapest flights most of the time and it is my favorite flight search engine. Many times you will be forwarded from Kayak to the eDreams flight search engine. Therefore, I will check both most of the time.
Skyscanner
Skyscanner is a great flight search engine if you are looking for the cheapest flight from your departure city, on a particular date but to anywhere in the world. Then you can choose your vacation destination based on the flight prices.
Traveloka
Traveloka is one of the leading flight and hotel booking platforms in South East Asia. I have found many cheap flights for that region. Furthermore they help you now as well to find the cheapest flights all around the world. It’s well worth checking out.
Kiwi
If for any reason you don’t like any of the other listed flight search engines, you can try kiwi.com. They have good offers as well.
Momondo
Other travellers claim that Momondo is the best websites to find cheap flights, but I can’t confirm that as I haven’t used them too often so far. I will use them in the future as well to compare the different prices.
LOW COST CARRIER – Budget Airlines
Low cost carrier airlines are companies where you have to pay extra for everything. That means most of the time no meals, no entertainment, no seat selection or no checked-in luggage is included. But if you are travelling on budget, that doesn’t matter and it’s a great way to save money.
When you book a budget airline flight, read carefully the terms & conditions.
- Some low cost airlines charge a big fee if your luggage is overweight
- for some other budget airlines you must print out your ticket otherwise you need to pay a fee,
- watch out for the airport they are departing of flying to, as often they will fly to airports which are further out of the city.
Low cost carrier in Asia
- AirAsia
In the Asian part of this world I flew many times with AirAsia as they had the best deals. An advantage of taking the same airline as AirAsia often is that you can collect their AirAsia BigPoints (loyalty points) and use them later for future flights to get discounts on the flight prices (same system as from the big airline alliances).
For short low cost flights around Europe I can recommend the following airlines
- EasyJet
- RyanAir
- Eurowings
Low cost carrier for long haul flights
- Norwegian
- Eurowings
Non low cost carrier for long haul flights
Local Airlines which are not on any search engines
It doesn’t happen too often anymore that airlines are not included in a flight search engine, but it is still possible, especially for small local airlines.
On example La Costena is a domestic Nicaraguan airline which flies to cities or the beautiful Corn Islands within Nicaragua and La Costena is not listed on flight search engines.
- Need to have proof of an onward flight? I can show you How to make a free “flight ticket” as proof of an onward flight.
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