Last Updated: 2024-03-06
Over the years, I’ve honed my skills in nabbing fantastic travel bargains. One of my most memorable finds was a roundtrip ticket with United Airlines from Seattle to Tokyo for a mere $377.16 back in 2016. Today, I am going to share with you my secrets on how I score these deals. Here’s an in-depth guide on how to uncover the best flight deals.
As a reminder, I am not affiliated with any of the tools listed below. I did not receive any monetary or other incentives from them. My opinions are solely based on my personal experience.
Anatomy of a Great Flight Deal
Securing a good flight deal hinges on four key factors, all revolving around flexibility:
- When you travel: Avoid peak holiday periods.
- How you travel: Consider red-eye flights, opting out of baggage, or more transfers.
- Where you travel: Embrace spontaneity with “take me anywhere” mindsets.
- When you look for deals: Odd hours might yield surprising results.
Having two of these factors can help you score a good while having at least three can score you a great one. While lacking flexibility doesn’t mean you won’t find deals, it certainly makes the hunt more challenging.
Finding the Best Prices
Google Flights
Google Flight is the most user-friendly way to find good flight deals.
I have a couple of Chrome extensions I use to supercharge my search. The first one is Legrooms for Google Flights. This extension allows your flight searches to show you how much legroom each flight has based on the plane and configuration they fly. Larger legroom will make for a more comfortable experience, especially for longer flights.
Going.com
Going.com is a great tool for those who don’t have the flexibility “when you look for deals” and live in the US. I use their Premium membership, which costs $50 a year, but a free membership will give you alerts on economy deals to the continental US. Once you sign up for an account, you select the airports you travel out of and Going.com looks for flight deals from that airport and emails them to you. If you sign up for the premium membership, you get additional access to economy deals to Alaska, Hawaii, and US territories as well as international travel. Premium membership also alerts you on mistake fares, points/miles deals, and lets you set up to 10 custom destination alerts. Currently, Going.com only works with US airports.
Pro Tip: Use Google Flights Explore Feature
If you have the flexibility of Where you travel, the Google Flights Explore Feature is a great tool to use to find good deals. You can simply set a month you want to travel and see the prices for various places in the work.
Purchasing the Ticket
The 24-hour refund rule
In the US, airlines are required to provide 24 hours in which you can cancel any plane ticket for a full refund.
If you find a good deal, do not wait! Buy it first! You can figure out if you can go and if it makes sense later. Most airlines make the cancellation process as easy as clicking a button on the website.
Buy during less trafficked hours
One thing I have noticed over the years is that pricing algorithms optimize for demand traffic. Consequently, it’s generally cheaper to purchase tickets during the middle of the week compared to the end. However, this doesn’t guarantee lower prices; it simply increases the likelihood of finding them.
Double Dip
Amex Offers
If you have an American Express credit card, you might have something called Amex Offers on your account. Sometimes Amex will offer you a rebate for purchasing plane tickets from a specific carrier. This is a great chance to double dip on making that great price an amazing price.
Pro Tip: Check the price again
A couple of airlines (e.g. Alaska Airlines) will allow you to switch tickets without any change fees. If you were to switch to a cheaper flight, you can often get the difference back in credit. A nice trick is to check and see if the prices for the same flight have gone down, if it has and you make a change to the same flight, you can get the price difference as a credit. I have done with a couple of times successfully. You can then just use that credit for future flights.
Securing the Best Seat
Where you sit on the plane matters quite a bit about your experience. I do not think sitting next to the toilets at the very back of the plane for $20 less is a great deal. First, turbulence is worse near the back of the plane. Second, it can smell.
Aero Lopa
Aero Lopa is a website that provides highly detailed diagrams of airline seating configurations. With this tool, you can see exactly what the interior of a particular flight is, down to where the windows will be on the flight.
SeatGuru
Seat Guru is an oldie but goodie. Although SeatGuru is not as detailed as Aero Lopa, it does highlight problematic seats (specifically ones that can’t recline or have particular restrictions). Another benefit of SeatGuru is that it allows users to provide photos of the aircraft (although most photos tend to be pretty old). I still use this tool to quickly make sure I didn’t select a poor seat.
Pro Tip: check seats again before the flight
I recommend checking the seat selection again when it is near your travel date (anywhere from a couple of days to a week). Usually, seat selections move around. Seats that were previously locked by the airlines also get released. This is a great time to see if you can find a better seat, especially if the seats you originally got were less than ideal.
Maximizing value
Now that you have found the perfect flight deal, let us talk about how to maximize the value of the purchase.
Where To Credit
One way to maximize the value of your ticket is to make sure you earn miles on it. Where To Credit makes it easy to figure out which frequent flyer program to deposit your points in. It is easy to use your points when they are consolidated into a few programs rather than having a couple of thousands of points here and there.
To use the tool, all you need to do is to find the airline and booking class you are flying. The booking class of your ticket can be challenging to find at times. The easiest way to do this is to use the ITX Matrix tool and find your exact flight. This should show you the booking class of your ticket.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I book Basic Economy?
This is a very personal question. I think for solo travelers, Basic Economy makes sense. But if you are traveling with someone else, it’s always nice to make sure you two sit together. I would generally recommend steering away from basic economy tickets.
If When you travel is particularly challenging for you, I would also recommend steering clear of Basic Economy. The change and cancellation restrictions on Basic Economy fares are usually much stricter than in Main Cabin. For example, Alaska Airlines allows you can cancel your main cabin fare and get credit even if you cancel less than 24 hours before flying. This is not possible with a basic economy fare.
Should I use OTAs for plane tickets?
I do not buy plane tickets from Online Travel Agencies anymore. This is because when things go wrong (e.g. flight gets canceled, need to switch flights, need to cancel, etc), you need to deal with the OTA rather than the airline. This can get complicated since both airlines and OTA have their separate terms. Generally, the fewer intermediaries you need to deal with when things go awry the better.
Should I use US Low-cost Carriers?
I generally do not book tickets on Spirit or Frontier. In my experience, the total cost of the ticket is usually about the same as a full-service carrier. These tickets might be helpful for young solo travelers, but I find them to require too much mental overhead to figure out if it is worth it.
Deal Seeking Pitfalls
There are some common pitfalls that one can fall prey to when one gets into the deal-chasing game. Below are some of the ones to watch out for.
Forgetting what you are optimizing for
It is easy to get into the mindset of always buying the cheapest ticket. Who wouldn’t want to save an extra $20 on a flight ticket to Hawaii or Las Vegas? But there are times when that $20 is not worth it. If the $20 more expensive flight saves you a 6-hour layover, pick the more expensive flight. I think I can safely say that most people’s time is worth more than $3.33 per hour. It gets even worse when the cheaper flight has an overnight layover. I am sure you can’t find a hotel near the airport for $20 a night. Don’t fall into this trap. Remember what is the most important thing to you (whether it be time, money, or enjoyment).
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, this guide will help you get cheaper flights for future travel. I’ll be keeping this guide up to date as I find new tips and tricks. If you found this guide helpful, share your recent deals in the comments or pass it along to a friend. Happy hunting! ✈️
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