Flights can consume the largest part of your travel expenses, therefore, finding ways of locating cheap flights is as important as choosing your travel destination. The thing is, if a flight is too expensive, then you may not even want to visit that particular destination. However, there are certain hidden secrets to finding cheap flights that most people don’t know about. Here are some tips on unusual ways to find cheap flights.
Use Private Browsing
Flight prices tend to increase when a particular routine is continuously searched. Web sites use cookies on your browser and thus use such information, to scare you from booking a certain flight when the prices are still low. It is, therefore, advisable to use private or incognito browsing when looking for the lowest flight prices. Ensure you reset or clear your cookies after every search. This way, you will not leave footprints when browsing.
Choose Travel Dates Wisely
Airline ticket prices tend to vary with the season, day of the week, upcoming events or holidays like New Year’s Eve, Christmas, and Thanksgiving among others. Most people in Europe travel in August, so prices tend to surge around this time. Furthermore, everyone wants to run away from the cold winter months and enjoy a warm holiday elsewhere, when the kids are not in school.
Therefore, if you book your flight when everyone else is going for a holiday, then you are going to pay high flight charges. If Paris is your preferred holiday destination, why don’t you go there during fall or spring? During these seasons, less people are heading there, and you will enjoy discounted flight charges.
Use different search engines
It’s tempting to always head straight to Skyscanner but there are so many flight search engines available, including Kayak, Momondo and Hipmunk. Visit lots of different sites or travel apps to figure out which one is offering the cheapest fare.
Consider paying in a different currency
Sometimes flights may be cheaper if you change the currency that you’re paying in.Sometimes sites will let you change the currency but you can also use a VPN so it appears as if you’re booking in a different country.
Often airlines will make you pay in the currency that you’re departing from – sometimes they will offer to convert to your own currency, but beware of doing this as they will often give you a bad exchange rate. If you’re paying in a foreign currency then make sure that you have a credit card which doesn’t charge you foreign transaction fees.
Choose Destinations Wisely
If your schedule is limiting and you find it impossible to be flexible with your flight dates, then you should know how to choose your destinations wisely. There are various tools and platforms at your disposal like Kiwi.com, where you can find some of the cheapest destinations to fly. This site identifies the cheapest flights going into a region and mixes and matches carriers to help you find the best deal. This way, you will always end up with the cheapest flight.
Use Budget Carriers
Some time back, if you were to fly from one continent to the other, you had to use traditional expensive airlines. The good news is that those days are long gone. Numerous budget carriers serve long-haul routes nowadays. It is therefore possible to travel around the world at a huge discount. Although budget carriers are not many in America, you will find several in Asia and Europe, where competition is stiff.
Book with a Travel Agent
Travel agents manage to access discounted rates, which are not accessible to the public. This is especially the case when booking first or business class, so we’d recommend looking to a specialist for the cheapest business class flights. Airlines like to fill up their business class cabins but don’t want to advertise dirt cheap prices online, so they use specialist agents to sell these tickets privately.
Bottom Line
Along with hotels and accommodation, flights are often one of the biggest costs when booking a trip. By using these simple tips you should be able to find cheap flights and minimise travel expenses.