

Here are the major airfare comparison sites. It might even be Google with Google Flights.įor now there isn’t a clear “best flight booking site” so I still use multiple sites when looking for flights. Perhaps one day there will be an ultimate booking engine that will be the go-to site for booking airfares, just as google is the go-to search engine for most people. The business of flight booking is a competitive space, and so far no site has emerged as the Google of airfare bookers. These sites will compare a combination of prices from travel agents as well as flights quoted directly from the airline. Here are the most common ways to find and book cheap flights online.įare finders (also known as flight comparison sites and airfare aggregators) are metasearch sites that compares multiple travel sites and displays the results on one page. Being aware of nearest airports helps, though many of the booking sites now offer the option to search alternative airports. I once saved €180 by flying out of a Eindhoven instead of Amsterdam. For example if you wanted to go to Southeast Asia in March but don’t have a set itinerary, see what your flight options are for the major hubs like Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. If your destination airport is not locked in, then try some different airport searches. By moving the dates around you could save hundreds of dollars on long-haul flights. It might end up being that your cheapest ticket is on the 12th.Īll the major fare finders offer the search option where you can search by month. Instead give pre-warning that you are going to be away for two weeks in that month, and then look for the cheapest ticket. If you are working and are taking two weeks off, don’t tell your boss you are going to be away from the 15th to the 30th. This is more useful if you are planning a trip in the future that isn’t set in stone. Obviously this is not helpful if you’re on a tight schedule and can only fly on certain days. My month one sample shown above does leads into the next advice for finding cheap flights.īetter advice for picking a day to travel is to be flexible with your travel dates.

Just because you found a cheap flight on a Tuesday doesn’t mean it happens for all the other millions of flights. In statistical analysis, the phrase “correlation does not imply causation” comes to mind. Holiday makers may have left en masse on Friday and Saturday, while business travellers got going on Monday, so the travel agent would tell you that Tuesday was the cheapest day. Back in the day when booking a flight was through a travel agent at a store, and the general public weren’t flying as much as today. Historically it might have been that the cheapest day to fly was on a Tuesday. Just as a quick example I did a search for flights between London and New York in six weeks time, using the feature of showing the cheapest flights for every day of the month.Īs you can see the top 5 cheapest days were: Many of the “how to find cheap flights” blog posts are pedalling this so-called travel hack. I call this the “Cheap Flights on Tuesday” fallacy. There’s a lot of misinformation about when is the cheapest day to fly.
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How to Find Cheap Flights When is the cheapest day to fly?
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Skyscanner | Momondo | Kayak | Kiwi | Matrix – ITA Software Here are the leading flight comparison websites. If you find a blog that says that “x is the best flight booking site”, they have probably been sponsored to say that.įor simple flight searches where there is a high proportion of non-stop flights between two cities, then the booking sites will show the same results.įor more complicated searches (routes with no direct services and multi-city trips), then it’s best to try the same search on a few different sites to compare results. Having booked hundreds of flights for myself I can say from experience that there’s no one best site to find the cheapest airfares. What this guide doesn’t include is collection flyer points by “travel hacking”, such as signing up for credit cards for bonus points. It includes the best fare finders available for booking flights, some lesser-known sites, as well as other tips and resources to find cheap flights to anywhere. The following is a guide how to find cheap flights. There are so many variables in airfare pricing that there’s always going to be price discrepancies between the flight search engines.īefore starting your airfare search it’s good to know what tools are available for flight booking. When it come to booking flights online we all want to find the cheapest flights possible.
