Cheap Airline Tickets
How to Find Cheap Airline Tickets
Everyone loves to travel, but no one likes to pay for airline tickets. Few things are worse than sitting down on a flight and learning that the person next to you paid half what you did for their airline ticket.
So what is the secret to finding cheap airfare?
If you search the Internet for “cheap airline tickets”, you will get thousands of search results of websites promising that they can sell you a ticket for less. And most travelers think that there is some sort of magical way in which cheap tickets can be obtained.
- Are tickets cheapest when you buy them a long time in advance?
- At the last minute?
- If you book through a discount travel company, or straight from the airline itself?
You might as well try to correlate cheap airline tickets with the phases of the moon. The truth of the matter is, there is no ‘best,’ magical way that you can always get the lowest price on airfare.
But there is one truth about trying to find cheap airline tickets; the more time you spend looking for a deal, the more likely you are to get one.
Tips for Getting a Great Deal on Your Plane Ticket
How to Find Cheap Airline Tickets
Start early. If you are going to plan a trip, start looking at airfare early. If you know how much a ticket to San Diego from Salt Lake City has cost over the past few months, you’ll recognize a great deal when you see it. When a low price does come around, you can pounce.
Read the fine print. Nowadays, airlines will charge you for just about anything and everything, including your luggage, to a bag of Cheetos, on-board Wi-fi, or even the privilege of watching the in-flight movie. In the last year, Southwest Airlines has gained many fans after deciding not to charge passengers for regular checked baggage. Figure in these added costs before deciding that one air carrier is cheaper than the other.
When and Where You Go Can Cost or Save Money
Be flexible in your travel plans. If you do not have to come and go on specific dates, you can save a lot of money. Traveling on the weekends is more expensive than traveling in the middle of the week, and flights that leave early in the morning or late at night are also cheaper.
Traveling during big holidays can cost an arm and a leg. But sometimes you only have to leave a few days before the holiday and leave a few days after in order to avoid having to paying out the nose. And traveling on less busy days is less frustrating, doesn’t take as long, and is not nearly as unpleasant.
Consider alternative airports. Not everyone has this option, but if there are smaller, less popular airports near where you live, you can often get cheaper tickets in and out of those cities.
Consider alternative destinations. If you just need to get away, and you have no preference about which beach you lay out on, you can use sites like Kayak to compare rates to different destinations from Florida to southern California.
Do the Research
Scour the web. It used to be that when you were planning a vacation, you would take a trip to your local travel agent first. But now, with a wealth of information available on the web, you can do the grunt work yourself and end up with a great deal.
Don’t forget to check the individual airline’s website. When an airline announces a sale, they put that information on their own website first. Since sites like Hotwire take a cut of the price of the sale ticket, sometimes you can get a lower fare on the airline’s webpage.
How Do You Know When You Should Buy the Airline Ticket?
After doing all of this research, one of the hardest parts about buying a cheap ticket is actually buying it. After all, if fares dropped $50 more than you thought they would, could they drop more? But, if you wait too long, you miss the great deal on the cheap airline ticket, and prices do go up.
This is where Farecast.com comes in. This website actually tells you whether you should wait to book a flight because rates may go even lower, or if you should go ahead and buy. The site predicts whether fares will rise, fall, or stay the same over the following seven days. The site can predict fares on flights up to two and a half months in advance, and most of the time it is right.
If you only travel a couple of times a year, this may be more information than you ever needed to find a cheap airline ticket. But if you travel often, and would travel more if you could do it even cheaper, than each of these tips can prove invaluable.
So if you are willing to put forth the time and effort, you can become quite the travel agent yourself, as well as save yourself a small fortune in airfare costs.
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This entry was posted on Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 2:58 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.