How to Book Cheap Flights

Travel is a stigma for many people because they believe they cannot afford it due to pricing of accommodation, but most importantly flights. Where you are based around the world does affect indeed your ability to visit more countries at a better price, but we can still help you to find the best deals wherever you are based.

So let’s get started, who doesn’t want to get the cheapest flights? Whether it is business, first class or economy, it’s human nature to always want to get the best deal. We created this post for you to get the best tips and trick on how to find cheap airfares. Please do share this around to all your friends and family!

Let us tell you that travelling can be for anyone and even at a smaller budget. More and more airfare tickets are dropping in price due to high competition (partly caused by many new start-ups and budget airlines), which makes it quite affordable for more people to travel the world. However the difficulty for most people is the knowledge of HOW to find these cheaper tickets. AdventureFaktory’s goal is to help you to travel more and to get out of your confort zone, hence we will help you find these great deals. Let us take you through our key tips and hacks that hopefully will save you time and money when you book your upcoming trips! Our goal is to help you maximise your probability of getting THE epic deal, so hang in there and let’s try to make you save some money!

1) Go Incognito

We can hear you already being like, “we know and we don’t even know if that even work”. We understand many people believe it’s a myth, but there is this magical thing called “Cookies” and searching for the same flight on the same browser multiple times can actually raise the price of your plane ticket! These websites use cookies to bump the price up and scare you into sporadically booking the flight quickly before the price rises even more. You actually made your flight more expensive yourself and they win.

We also sometimes use VPNs and change our location to book the flights. We have seen prices jump down of 200$US on some of the flights we booked!

To recap, make sure to always search incognito/private browsing mode to see the lowest prices. Every time you open a new incognito window your cookies are reset. If you’re unsure how to open a private browsing window follow these simple steps:

• Google Chrome/Safari: Command (Ctrl if using a PC) + Shift + N.
• Mozilla Firefox/Internet Explore: Command (Ctrl if using a PC) + Shift + P.

Note: Did you know that SkyScanner actually does not use cookies or use any type of tracking system on flight searches? So in this case you can only try to change your location of booking with a VPN and see if there is any price difference!

2) Frequent Flyer Programs

Sign up, sign up, sign up! “guys we know, but we never get enough points”, but NO, hey.. just do it and the best is to sign up with credit cards that gives you a point per dollar spent, etc. Frequent flyer programs are a great way for scoring free flights (ok you may have to only pay taxes), free upgrades, First Class Lounges, priority check-in, baggage allowance and hotel perks. Even if you don’t fly too much with one signe airline, like we said, we recommend you to sign up for an airline rewards program tied with a credit card. Either way, it’s 100% free to sign up and you can earn points by shopping at partner stores, etc.

You will want to check which programs best fits your travel needs if you don’t want to waste your time and sign up with all cards. Note that some frequent flyer programs are more beneficial and rewarding than others. We gathered up a list of them for you to consider and as you will notice, et best ones to go for are the ones that gather a lot of airlines such as OneWorld, Star Alliance and SkyTeam.

3) Booking with a Budget Airline

We love luxury, but we also love keeping that money for experiences. So when we don’t feel like we want or can make it rain, we book budget! You can check our latest article with the Ultimate list of all budget airlines on the planet! That will help you save some moolah for sure!

So of course, when booking budget, you learn to not complain about their customer service, the reliability and the extra costs on … well extras like food, water, baggage, etc. So understand that it’s called “budget” for a reason and these players are significantly cheaper than their full-service counterparts. If you can “suck it up” and all you want to to get to the final destination, this is THE option for you.

Things you should consider before flying budget

• Check In Luggage Extra Cost– If you are lucky, it will include hand baggage (which is strict as well, some won’t let you have that regular bigger 7kg carry-on). So yeah, if you want to check-in some kind of 20kg or plus, you will have to pay extra. Within Europe and America, nearly all carriers now charge for check-in luggage, even United Airlines, British Airways and Lufthansa! Can you believe? It’s getting quite competitive!
• Airport Location –Budget airlines tend to use secondary airports/terminals further away from the city. Make sure you make your calculations if it is even worth it to fly to that airport location or the taxi/transfer will end up more expensive!
• Impractical timings: Sometimes their time of departure and landing are quite not convenient. Make sure you book fairly in advance to not get the worse times!
• Print Your Ticket – Yup, you dont’ want to pay that ridiculous money because you forgot to print your ticket! RyanAir as an example will charge you if you haven’t printed it out!
• Nothing Is Included – Surprise! Not even water. So make sure to pack up your essentials in your bag/purse. Of course forget about snacks, food, seat selection etc. For nearly all budget carriers these are paid extras.

4) Research on Flight Search Engines

So many flight search engines out there, but let us tell you more about these players. You need to understand that flight search engines are not good for every area of the world, for example, some may be better in Asia whilst others in Europe. Even with SkyScanner.com, you might put it aside for a local website which would have better finds for a specific region of the world. Note as well not all airlines are listed with these flight search engines. Which will lead to our point #5 of always checking again on the airlines’ website itself if the price can be better than what you have found?

Before we give our recommendations, note to stay away from 3rd party travel agencies like Priceline, Expedia, Orbitz and TripAdvisor Flights as they take a cut from the airlines which leads to generally have higher prices.

Here is a list of what we believe are the best flight search engines to use: 

• Skyscanner – Often known as THE tool for cheap travel. Skyscanner lets you search with extremely high flexibility due to their feature of searching “Anywhere” as a destination.
• Kayak – One of our favourite websites to get a quick and good overview of every airline out there. It’s easy to use, straight forward, and finds everything from small regional or low cost airlines to the well established international carriers. They’ve got a lot of useful gadgets like credit card cost overviews and price alarms too.
• Momondo – A similar search engine to Kayak, they tend to offer prices from a wider range of booking platforms, however some of the really cheap ones are not reputable. So it’s worth a look, before booking anything
• ITA Matrix – This one is more time consuming, but can be very fun. You can do anything from filtering specific airlines or aircraft, routes, preferred connecting times, overnight stops, etc! We will make sure to make you a guide on how to use it if you are a beginner.

5) Verify on Airline’s website

We often book our flights on Flight Search Engines, but sometimes good deals only sit on the carrier’s website itself! For example, we booked a crazy flight from Montreal to London with a 4 night stopover in Iceland. This applies mostly for low-cost airlines as they generally have a separate booking system, hence their deals are not displayed on the international flight search engines. In any case, before booking, we always verify the fare on the Airline’s website JUST IN CASE the price is better!

6) Be flexible in your travels

We understand you can’t always be flexible due to your leave dates or fixed national holidays, but the more flexible, the better. Yup, when wanting the best price for your flights, always be FLEXIBLE! This goes for everything from your comfort to your timings and destination even! Flights might be in timing you will NOT like, but a difference of one day in departure or landing can change the price of your ticket of a lot. Why? Simply because you are travelling when demand is at its lowest.

Try to also be flexible in your layovers. Don’t be precious, don’t fly direct, your flight will most likely be cheaper! Most of the time, the more stops, the cheaper your flight will be. We tend to extend our stopovers to be able to visit a new destination!

7) Compare The Price in Another Currency

If you are using a credit card that is free of foreign transaction fees, then you should try to compare if final pricing of your ticket is cheaper in another currency. We have seen sometimes significant savings of at least 100$US from booking in another currency, but again, make sure the currency exchange is on point and that you won’t get extra fees from your bank!

8) Search For Epic Deals & Fare Errors

This happens more than you think and it will be worth it to chase them! How? Well airlines sometimes make mistakes when posting their fares and you can totally book them before they fix it! This can happen due to technical glitches, human error or currency conversions. Of course, error fares tend to not last long at all as airlines pick up these errors when they notice the high influx of bookings. You will want to be quick and, again, be flexible! Here are a few websites for finding error fares and deals: FlyerTalk, Secret Flying, Holiday Pirates (this one is only for Europeans).

Hope you like this article, show us some love in the comment section and sharing it! The upcoming articles will give you insider tips and tricks to becoming a master travel and airline hacker and knowing where to find prices at incredible rates. So keep your eyes open on www.AdventureFaktory.com!

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