How to Save on Flights – The Ultimate Guide
The price of a plane ticket is often the most expensive part of a trip.
That’s why investing a little time in searching for a flight can pay off enormously.
Sometimes it’s simply a matter of luck, but with the right determination and the proper use of the countless tools available online, you can find some real gems.
In this guide you’ll learn all the secrets of finding cheap flights.
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Flexibility
Prices vary enormously depending on when you fly. Everyone wants to travel in August, at Christmas, at New Year’s, or on a long weekend and, believe me, the airlines know it all too well.
Traveling outside these dates is far cheaper, and so is flying early in the morning or late at night. Not many people want to do that, so the fares end up being better.
I know a lot of people can’t afford the luxury of being very flexible with their dates, but at least try to be flexible with your destination. Because when it comes to plane tickets, being flexible is rule number one for saving money.
In other words: chase the deal, not the destination.
Consider all the options
- Let’s take the Venice – Amsterdam route as an example.
- Departure 5 March 2018 – Return 11 March 2018
- The direct flight (round trip) costs 162€
This is undoubtedly the most convenient and quickest option, but with a bit of ingenuity you can spend less than half.
On the same day you can fly to Brussels from Treviso airport, which is about 30km from Venice’s, for 16.99€.
The leg from Brussels Zaventem to the Brussels North bus station costs only 3€.
From there you can take a direct bus to Amsterdam for 15.90€.
Great, you’ve made it to your destination!
To get back you can take the same route in reverse:
Now it’s time to catch the train, which costs 8.90€.
All that’s left is to get on the plane for 16.99€.
The total cost is 75.68€ versus 162€ for the direct flight. So you saved 86.32€.
I realize that for some people it isn’t worth the trouble, and often getting the schedules of all the different means of transport to line up is simply impossible. With this example I just wanted to show that sometimes it can be really worthwhile to consider all the options.
If you want another concrete example of “consider all the options”, take a look at the comments (at the bottom of the page) where Giulia explains how she managed to save more than 400€ on her flights to Asia!
Flight search engines
The search engines I use regularly are: Skyscanner, Momondo and Google Flights.
Later on I’ll talk about other ways to find really good deals.
How to use Skyscanner
I always start by ticking the “include nearby airports” option. As we saw earlier, it can happen that it’s cheaper to fly close to your destination and then get there by other means.
Searching for flights without a destination
If you’re flexible with the destination, enter the word “everywhere” to see all the cheapest destinations from a given airport or country.
Searching for flights without a date
If you’re flexible with the dates, use the “whole month” option to quickly see which days are the cheapest to fly.
Click “search flights” and you’ll get the following screen. You’ll notice that when you change the departure date, the options and the cost of the return flights change too. This happens because choosing a round trip with the same airline is normally cheaper. 
Finally, to track the price of a specific flight and get email notifications if the price changes substantially, press the “get price alerts” button.
Skyscanner is a great search engine and it was my favorite for years, but now I tend to prefer Google Flights, which I’ll walk you through in detail.
How to use Momondo
The great thing about Momondo – and the reason it’s so slow! – is that it searches ALL the airlines and travel agencies online.
Unlike Skyscanner and Google Flights, where you can enter flexible dates, Momondo works best for searching flights on specific dates, and in 98% of cases it manages to give you the cheapest fare.
The question comes up naturally: are these travel agencies (online travel agencies, or OTAs) reliable?
Yes, they’re reliable, but they cut costs by skimping on customer service and charging sky-high fees for cancellations or date changes.
If you don’t trust them and think you might need support or have to change your dates, then book the flight directly on the airline’s website.
To sum up, use Momondo if your dates aren’t flexible, or only after you’ve found the cheapest dates on Skyscanner or Google Flights.
The flight forecast feature on Momondo
The flight forecast feature you’ll find on this page is a fantastic tool for working out statistically when the best time to book your flight is. The data you’ll find in the “seasonality” and “when to book” tabs is particularly significant.
How to use Google Flights
Although it’s a relatively new flight search engine, it has already become the most powerful flight search tool out there. In fact, I’m thinking about using it systematically instead of Skyscanner.
Google Flights is super fast and shows the results of any search in a few seconds. Unlike Momondo – which searches for the cheapest travel agencies – Google Flights gives more visibility to the better-known agencies, like Orbitz and Expedia, which aren’t exactly that cheap.
Let’s look at some of these features.
Enter multiple departure or arrival airports
As you can see, Google already knows where you are thanks to geolocation.
In my case the suggested departure airport is Venice.
To add more airports, or simply change the suggested one, just click on it. You can enter up to a maximum of five airports, for both departure and arrival.
If you have specific dates, enter them, click the search button and it will show you the cheapest flights among the possible routes you entered.
Searching for flights without specific dates
Do you know you can travel for a week in April but you’re not tied to any particular departure date? Let’s see how to do it.
Enter the airport, or airports, of departure and arrival, and click on the departure date.
The following screen will come up.
The prices shown are the cost of a round-trip flight for a 10-day stay (you can change the duration as you like using the little arrows).
Basically, a round-trip flight leaving on 10 April and returning on the 20th would cost 332€, while leaving on the 12th and returning on the 22nd would cost 340€, and so on.
Alternatively, if you click on any date, prices will appear on all the following days. These are the prices of round-trip flights departing on the selected day.
In this case, leaving on 4 April the best price would be returning on the 10th, 17th or 24th (conveniently highlighted in green).
Finally
Look at flight prices on similar dates
After clicking “done”, this screen will come up
Clicking on “show more”
In this case we had already found the cheap flight, but by leaving on the 2nd instead of the 3rd and still returning on the 17th we could extend the vacation by two days while spending the same money on the plane ticket.
Use the “explore destinations” option
As we saw earlier, you can enter up to 5 destination airports, but what you may not know is that you can enter entire countries (e.g. India) or even geographic areas (e.g. Central America).
With this tool you need to enter specific dates to start the search.
By clicking on the circled box you can change the dates. Unfortunately, at the moment you can only search up to six months from today’s date and for trips of a weekend, one week or two weeks. Click on “all” to include all six months in the search.
Being able to search for these flights only for a set length of time (1 or 2 weeks) can be limiting and isn’t always the cheapest option, which is why I always recommend looking at flight prices on similar dates as we saw earlier.
Want to keep an eye on a particular flight?
Turn on the “track prices” option and get an email when the price changes significantly for the itinerary in question.
Google Flights is undoubtedly the best flight search engine, but not always the cheapest (it doesn’t take into account many online travel agencies that can sometimes offer a good price). So I recommend doing your searches on Google Flights and then checking the price of the flight in question on Momondo!
Beyond search engines
So far we’ve seen ways to search for flights yourself, but the best deals are normally the ones found by specialized sites.
There are sites that deal exclusively with finding so-called “price errors” or simply really good deals.
Try to check these sites daily because deals disappear fast. Following the various social pages can help you not let them slip away.
There are loads of sites like this and many deals are repeated (they definitely copy each other).
Let’s look at the ones that, in my opinion, are the best.
Secret Flying
To filter all the available deals and see only flights departing from Europe, click on “Europe”.
You’ll be shown all the deals in chronological order (the ones that are a few days old probably don’t exist anymore).
If you open one of the deals you can also see all the available dates. I recommend signing up for the newsletter, where you can also filter the type of deals you want to receive.
Flights Milan – New York starting from 298€
Pirati in viaggio
Choose “flights” from the available categories and leave everything else blank. You’ll be shown only departures from Italy. Unfortunately there isn’t a “Europe” option, or at least I wasn’t able to find one, so you’ll have to manually check the deals available from other European countries by changing the country at the top right.
Always remember that with the help of low-cost airlines like Ryanair, easyJet or Wizz Air, you can normally reach the departure airports of these super cheap flights while still keeping the cost down. Here you can find a complete list of the various low-cost airlines. These airlines often offer the best prices if you fly with only carry-on luggage, so pay attention to the flight terms and conditions.
Incognito mode and VPN
Apparently airlines keep track of our searches and raise the price of a given flight if it’s searched for several times. The idea is to make us panic and buy it before the price goes up even more. To avoid this there’s a simple solution: do your searches in incognito, that is, in private browsing mode!
Honestly, after running a few tests I didn’t notice any difference, but this may depend on the airline, the site used or the number of searches made in a given period of time, and since it costs nothing it’s worth doing.
What can really save you quite a lot of money is using the foreign version of a site. That way you’ll see the price in a currency different from the one used in the country you’re in. Some airlines detect your location and don’t let you book through the foreign version of the site. That’s where using a VPN comes in handy, which in a nutshell lets you make a site think you’re in whatever country you like and pay in the local currency. A practice that is really worthwhile in some cases.
Below you can see a Norwegian flight that is cheaper if you book through the UK site and pay in pounds, with no need to use a VPN.
As you can see, it’s exactly the same flight, and paid in pounds (at the current exchange rate) it turns out to be about 6€ cheaper.
Final thoughts
In the hope of getting the best price, people often tend to wait too long or not wait at all, and end up paying a lot. Prices go up and down, but you have to try to be realistic and set a (reasonable) price you’re willing to pay. If a round-trip ticket to Japan normally costs 600€ and you find one for 400€, don’t wait for it to drop to 300€ because it probably never will. Help yourself by using the “flight forecast” feature on Momondo – which I talked about earlier – and try to avoid buyer’s remorse.
One last thought about last-minute flights. If in the past airlines used to sell off the last available seats a few days before departure, now they tend to make money by exploiting so-called business trips, which almost never have flexible dates.
Happy flight hunting 🙂
Planning a trip? Check out these posts:
Which travel insurance to choose
Which travel backpack to choose
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