How to find cheap flights?

How to find cheap flights? How to travel cheaply? How to fly cheaply? These are the three main questions asked by my clients, guests, friends and in e-mails from visitors to my blog. I decided to create a mini guide based on the experience and information I have gained so far.

How to buy a bargain?

1. The cheapest tickets are from September to November and from January to the end of May. The highest prices of flight tickets you will find during Holidays (i.e. Memorial Day, Thanksgiving, 4^th of July weekend), summer months, Christmas and New Year.

2. Cheap tickets, especially in the most popular directions, sell out in the blink of an eye. If you know where you want to fly, find out what the bargain price is and as soon as you find a cheap ticket – buy it. Tickets consumes the largest part of the travel budget. Cheap accommodation, local transport, meals are no longer such a challenge as cheaply covering hundreds of kilometers from point A to point B.

3. If, while searching for the flight on the carrier’s website you notice that its price has increased in relation to the price during the first search, even a few minutes earlier, it means that the search engine wants to charge you more. When you go to the carrier’s website and search for a flight for the first time, the price is attractive. If you are undecided and search for the same flight again after some time, the search engine remembers your first choice and the price automatically increases as your interest in the flight increases. It’s all due to cookies. If you delete all browsing history and cookies, the search engine will recognize you as a “new customer” and then the ticket price will be low, as they want to acquire a new passenger.

4. If you fly regularly in the same direction, e.g. you live abroad and visit Poland, the system remembers your search history. To avoid this, use the Incognito mode in Google Chrome each time (cookies will not be saved), or restart our internet modem and in this way you will get a new IP address, and carrier will treat you as a new customer.

5. Cheap flights are mid-week flights, the cheapest departure/arrival days are Tuesday-Thursday. When planning a vacation, it is worth considering that its beginning and end fall in the middle of the week. When flying cheap, flexibility in departure and return dates is important.

6. The most overpriced tickets are those for direct connections. Spread your journey to your destination over several separate flights, as short-haul flights are the cheapest. A good way is to look for flights thru other countries. When I was looking for tickets to Belgium, all flights were at a similarly high price. The solution was a flight at a promotional price to Warsaw, and from there a cheap flight to Brussels.

7. In the case of low-cost airlines, such as Ryanair, Wizzair, JetBlue, Spirit or Frontier, you will find the cheapest ticket prices two or three months before the planned departure. The situation is different in the case of national airlines of a given country (e.g. Lot, British Airways, American Airlines), here – the earlier – the cheaper.

8. It is worth buying tickets at night, as the prices are much lower than during the day. If you can’t search for a cheap deal at night and need to buy a ticket during the day, it’s best to do it between 8am and 6pm. It is not worth buying tickets during the weekend, because their prices are more expensive due to the fact that many people have time to search for tickets.

For example, Ryanair or Wizzair usually place promotions on Mondays and Thursdays during the night.

I recommend taking advantage of the LOT promotion – “Crazy Wednesday”. Every week on Wednesday LOT offers very cheap direct flights to i.e. Tbilisi, Beijing, Toronto, Chicago or New York.

9. By entering specific flight dates in the search engine, the price usually increases, because since we provide the date, the system perceives it as our certainty of departure on that day and imposes a higher price on us. A good solution is to use the so-called monthly price calendar, or entering an earlier / later departure date.

10. If your destination is one of the exotic countries, i.e. the Caribbean, Thailand, Bali, it is worth looking for departures from cities such as London, Frankfurt, Paris, to which you can fly by charter at a very low price. This is due to the high popularity of flights to exotic destinations from these countries, and thus the high competition of carriers’ prices.

11. The cheapest flights from outside Europe (North and South America, Asia) can be found from the so-called air hubs, i.e. main transfer ports, with a well-developed network of connections. In Europe, these include the following cities: London, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, Rome, Brussels, Madrid.

12. If you can, I recommend traveling with a backpack / carry-on. This not only reduces travel costs, but also helps save time. You don’t have to wait in the baggage claim queue at the airports. I almost never use checked baggage. I take only a few necessary cosmetics with me (tourist size), and buy the rest at the destination.

13. A good way is to send an e-mail to the carriers’ PR departments with a request to be added to their contact database. If a given airline launches a new promotion for air tickets, cheap destinations, etc., it first sends an email to everyone on its list, i.e. to aviation, cheap flying, information portals. Before this information is processed and published on a given portal, you gain a few hours’ advantage, which allows you to hunt down an air promotion before it is officially published.

14. Do not limit yourself to one flight search engine, always check several. The best are: www.skyscanner.com, www.momondo.com, www.ebookers.com, www.expedia.com.

If you know any other proven ways to travel cheaply, please write them in the comments.