How to Find Cheap Flights

Flights can be one of the most expensive parts of your holiday, so if you can find a way to bring their costs down, you can keep some extra coin for the rest of your trip. Learning how to find cheap flights isn’t easy – there are so many websites and options to explore. Travel agents were good in the past, but the truth is now you’re much more likely to end up spending more on flights if you go down that route. That’s nice if you like to keep people in business, but I’d prefer to stretch my travel money out further – so I set out to learn how to find cheap flights.

Whenever I decide I’m going somewhere, I always pull up these sites to check what the prices are going to be:

www.Adioso.com
www.Skyscanner.com
www.momondo.com

For flights to and from America I find that Expedia is quite useful, or even Kayak.

The key to really saving money is to be somewhat flexible. When I was looking at flights home from Europe earlier this year, originally I had thought, by default, to fly from Heathrow. Flights were going to cost me around $1,500 (NZD) for a one way flight home – that’s expensive, especially as I’d paid a few hundred more and made my way around the entire world. I’d already been to London twice and didn’t really feel the need to visit again, so I pulled up those other sites and reverse checked prices.

I entered for New Zealand to Everywhere and decided to check what places were cheap to fly TO from New Zealand – even though I was planning to go the other way. Istanbul came up as a cheap flight away from Auckland, costing only $800 (NZD). I checked the price and dates from flying from Istanbul to Auckland and it was in fact only $800. This meant that I had an extra $700 to play around with and Istanbul was always somewhere I wanted to visit. A faster way to find this type of multi city flight hack, is to use Hopupon. It removes the reverse search and finds the Istanbul stop in seconds. To find a flight like this with Hopupon all you need to do is put in your departure and arrival airports select Hop One Way and the search. It will combine every direct flight combination, so you can see a new city, save money and get home!

Last night I decided to book flights to Asia. Ideally I’m going to end up meeting a friend in Koh Phangan, but there’s no airport really close to there. I searched for flights from my home town to Thailand, but they all came up fairly expensive. So, I decided that I’d fly from Auckland, which isn’t expensive for me to get to, to Singapore which is an International hub in Asia. From Singapore I can grab a cheap flight to anywhere in Asia. In the end I wound up with flights from New Zealand to Singapore for $520 only three weeks in advance; that’s really cheap!

The flights aren’t amazing; they stop via Melbourne and Darwin for four hours each – but as I’m freelance writing that will be a good opportunity to hopefully charge my laptop and get some more work done. I could have chosen a direct flight, but it would have cost me another $250 and the 4 hour extra flight time is worth saving, for me at least.

When I was booking my flights to Asia I went directly to the airline’s website and entered from Auckland to Phuket, and it ended up spitting out a figure much, much more expensive than SkyScanner had given me. Usually the inverse is true, but it’s always good to directly compare. It turns out it’s much more expensive for me to book Auckland-> Phuket than Auckland->Singapore->Phuket even if I end up on the same flights, so guess what I’d prefer?

The truth about how to find cheap flights is really that you have to learn how to manipulate dates and airports. If you’re searching for cheap flights and struggling, consider flying out of nearby airports or into nearby airports. For most parts of the world, especially in Europe, cities are so close together that you can fly into one, take a train to another and end up at your final destination after saving a few hundred dollars.

Saving money on your flights, before you’ve even left for your trip, is the perfect way to get your adventure started.

Do you have any tips for how to find cheap flights? I’d love to know any travel secrets