Airfare is one of the most expensive pieces when booking a trip. Cheaper airfare can make or break a travel budget, or even help you choose a destination. My favorite way to book tickets is to use frequent flyer mile (more about that in later posts) but if thats not possible, how do you find the affordable flights?
Timing when you buy is critical. The day of the week is important, with Tuesdays being the cheapest, specifically Tuesday morning. For any other day of the week, afternoons are cheaper than mornings to purchase a flight. Thursdays and weekends are when prices are at their high. The day of the week you choose to actually fly on is also important. Flying during midweek is cheapest, while Monday, Friday and weekends are more expensive. If you are looking for an international flight, typically the sooner you buy it, the cheaper it is. Domestic flights are sometimes better to purchase between 3-6 weeks out. Then, if a flight isn’t sold out, the airlines will try to drop prices to fill up the plane.
A lot of people think that search engines help in comparing different flight prices. The fact of the matter is that Expedia owns Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire, Ebookers and CheapTickets. And Priceline owns Booking.com, Agoda and Kayak. So if you are comparing prices, you will see a lot of the same prices on each of these sites. What you would definitely want to avoid is a mileage broker that buys up frequent flyer miles to get a ticket and resells it to you, which is against most airline’s policies. One such reseller is JustFly, which the Better Business Bureau advises against using. Even using reputable online travel agencies, such as Expedia or Kayak, can lead to trouble if a problem with your flight arises. For example, if you buy a flight from Expedia, ticketed by American Airlines but flown on Aer Lingus, and there is a problem with a connections, sometimes the airline counter could direct you to call Expedia, who says call American, who says talk to Aer Lingus. It is the safest policy to buy tickets directly through an airline.
I like Google Flights for comparing prices as it will show many different online travel agencies and airlines. Just remember that Southwest doesn’t let their prices show on Google and they are often the cheapest choice. You have to go to their site directly.
One way to get to Europe more cost effectively is to take a cheaper flight over the pond to just get on the continent, then take one of the many inexpensive intra-European flights to get to your final destination. For example we wanted to take our family to Prague last summer, but found the tickets were roughly $1,200. However, we found tickets to Budapest for $700 which is a decided savings when multiplied by 5 people! We combined Prague and Budapest which ended up being a blast. Cities like Iceland and Dublin typically have cheaper flights from the US and are great gateways to Europe. Here are a few examples of using Google flights:
I put Chicago to Dublin into Google flights from June 6-13 and a variety of different airline choices come up:
But if I’m not as determined to use the dates of June 6-13, I can see that there are dates in May at a better price point.
The choices of airlines are excellent and not budget airlines!
But say you really only have June 6-13 to travel, you could push the “Explore” button on the far left column and see where you could go during those dates in Europe (or anywhere else in the world- just move the map around). Munich is a good value and is shown in green. You can also press the “Track Prices” toggle button just under the search bars to have google e-mail you when prices change.
I used the explore feature to see where I could go from Munich. Looks like Venice is a good value!
Here you can see how Budapest is significantly cheaper for these dates than Prague (and it was even more of a difference when we went). It appears like Vienna is pretty inexpensive with a “great value” of $877, but the trip is 41 hours long! Not such a good value after all.
I like Google flights to track flight prices, but another great site is a website called https://www.skyscanner.com/. It works similarly to Google flights. When you put in the city you want to depart from, Skyscanner has a feature you can use to explore destination prices. Simply put “everywhere” into the destination box and it will give you prices for travel all over the world. It even has a price alert feature that lets you monitor prices for a particular destination and will let you know if prices are typical or going down. I have also heard of people using Kayak Explore ( but remember it is owned by Priceline) and Momondo, which is a highly rated metasearch engine and doesn’t sell tickets itself. It would be great to use in tandem with Google flights.
While in the US you can purchase a one-way for exactly half of a round-trip, its best to buy a round trip ticket to Europe as you will be pay just as much for a one-way ticket as a round trip. But you can still pay round trip prices if you want to land and depart from different cities. You would want to book an open jaw ticket, otherwise known as multi-city.
To search for a multi-city fare on Google flights, press the drop-down menu under round trip and select multi-city.
Here I’ve entered leaving from Chicago and arriving in Munich, then departing from Venice and flying back to Chicago all on one ticket.
You can see with exploring the right websites and tracking flights, you can reduce the cost of your next flight! Bon voyage!
Maho Beach, St Maarten (Picture at top of blog is from our trip in 2010)
Cara Unravels Travel 