Finding a cheap flight can be daunting. With travel being as popular as it is there are hundreds, if not thousands, of sites vying for your attention each with the promise of having the lowest price available. Over the years, however, I've cultivated plenty of tips and tricks on how to get the most bang for your buck when flying:
1. Start looking early
In fact the earlier the better. I've gone so far as to book flights a full year in advance because I wanted to travel on a specific date. While most of the time you won't have the luxury of knowing that far out when you want to travel, the best method is to search for your flight and track it's progress, figure out which carriers go there most often and become generally more aware of what the range of prices to go there is.2. Browse flights in a "Private" browser
This is an often overlooked problem when browsing the internet for flights. If you're looking at a site and search for a flight, then search for the flight again have you ever noticed that the price is suddenly higher? That's because the website is tracking your activity with a cookie. To avoid this you should use a private window of your browser (called Incognito mode in Chrome) to do your searching. Even then I've found that I needed to quit the private window entirely and open a new one because the site was tracking my session activity.
3. Shop around
It's really easy to get into a rut with where you buy your travel. Whether it's a preferred carrier or a specific site (i.e. Expedia, Priceline, etc.) a lot of times I have found in conversation that people rely too heavily on a single source of information. My routine for shopping for a flight usually starts on Google Flights. For a long time I relied on Bing Flights but it was shut down and before it became well known I was using Kayak. After I check out Google Flights I go to my preferred carrier (American Airlines) and check their prices directly. Finally I'll take a look at ITA Matrix and see what they have to say about it, even though they are owned by Google now it is easier to take a look at the whole picture there.4. Follow the "Flight Deal" aggregators
I started off just following along with Secret Flying, then branched out to The Flight Deal. Today I follow six different flight deal sites and use Slack to keep track of them all. This can be fatiguing to watch tweets go by every day but using Slack allows me to set highlight words and filter through the noise to get the information I actually want. Each site has a newsletter, Facebook page, and Twitter feed however I find Twitter to be the most timely option since you can see a good deal as soon as it goes live and have a better chance at getting it.5. Watch the news and pay attention to trends
When my family went to South Africa we got tickets for $700 each. To fly for 22 hours direct to Johannesburg had never dropped below $1000+ before. That year I had been reading that the economy of South Africa had taken a hit after the boom of tourism surrounding the World Cup, and since tourism is a large part of their economy they were beginning to look at ways to encourage more people to visit. Sure enough the government airliner (South African Airways) started their sales and my whole family was able to enjoy a fantastic adventure. Another thing to pay attention to is the tourist seasons. If you're willing to travel off-season, for example going to Scandinavia in winter, you can save a lot of money and see a new country at a time of year most travellers don't experience.An excerpt of this post can be found on Forbes and the Level Up by Forbes newsletter
I did knew some of these tips already,but your post was very useful.I will share it with my friends who travel a lot.
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