Booking a fight at its cheapest price is quite a difficult task and when it comes to the international flights, the task becomes more complicated.
As a user you are in battle against airlines and booking websites, and they want to make as much money as they can.
So, to outsmart them you need a Swiss knife of international flight booking. Read along to find the tricks to make your next international flight less struggling, less frustrating and less expensive.
Most of the websites keep a track of what a user is searching about. And it is not surprising to say that they charge you the ticket price on the basis of what you have searched about on the website.
When you repeatedly search about flight or hotel prices for a particular route, destination, the website tracks it using the cookies of your browser and it helps them to charge you extra price. They entice you by sending notifications to book the tickets quickly at higher price by saying that the price will increase more in the coming days.
So, use the Incognito mode available on many web browsers, this will keep your search a secret. This also means that avoid booking flight tickets from a mobile app, which doesn’t allow any secrecy.
Booking return tickets will help you save money and the only condition is that the purchase should be with the same airline.
For example, the return ticket from New York to Paris will definitely be less than the two one way tickets purchase separately.
Another way is to book multi-city flights if you are planning to travel to multiple cities. This method needs some effort in research and flexibility in destinations.
Book the cheapest combination of both To & From cities for your Onward and Return journey. Land into a particular city, travel to other connecting cities, and fly back from a completely different city. It might sound expensive, but it works and you can actually end up saving a couple of hundred dollars.
A lot of famous websites charges a very high price for booking an international flight. These websites have integrated additional dynamic prices algorithms to increase prices based on demand.
Find cheap flight on search engines like Google Flights, Skyscanner, Kayak, Airfarewatchdog, Air Wander, Jet Radar, Cheapoair and Momondo.
These websites will aggregate the prices across booking websites. Then you can compare and book your flight from the one offering the best prices.
At times, the airline’s own website offers the cheapest rates, so don’t forget to check them out.
Lot of carriers across the world offer budget and low-cost flight tickets. The best part is that some of these airlines also run long route flights so that you can book your next international flight from these airlines.
Some of the best low-cost airlines in the world include Spirit Airlines, Flair Airlines, Sun Country Airlines, Vueling Airlines, Ryanair, Frontier, Air Asia, TigerAir, Jeju Air, Spice Jet, India, Spring Airlines, Norwegian Airlines, Jet Star.
While, these flight carriers might not be the most comfortable ones and they expect you to pay for every extra services including check-in baggages, but they are an amazing choice if you can travel light.
Most of the visitors like to go for an international flight during the weekends, making the price of the tickets more expensive around weekends.
So if you want to purchase cheap airline tickets, the best travel days are during the midweek days.
Tuesday happens to be the most inexpensive day when the price of all international flight falls off normally because people travel least during this day.
However it must be noted that it is not correct all the time. It may happen that there is some special event on Tuesday or a festival falls around weekdays and that may cause a surge in flight prices.
It has been advised by almost all of the websites, persons, travelers to book your international tickets in advance to get a cheap deal.
It is true that the price of the ticket rises as the departure date gets closer, but normally the price will either increase or decrease based on the demand.
It may happen that there is decrease in prices after you have booked the flight tickets because of the fallen demand. That is why, it is not advised to book too early.
The best time to book a ticket is 5-8 weeks in advance from the departure date. This will also give you enough time to take care of your travel visa and hotel bookings.
You should always purchase tickets individually for last minute cheap flights. You should never purchase tickets for many persons together in one purchase.
If you search the tickets and purchase them for the whole group together at one time you will be charged on the basis of price of seat with the highest price.
For example, if you purchase three tickets together and the price of the first seat is $200, second seat is $250 and third seat is $300. If you purchase tickets for all the three friends together, you will be charged on the basis of highest priced seat that is $300 for each seat. However, if you purchase the tickets for each person differently, you will be charged as per the seat's price and thus you can save more.
Prices of the flight tickets depend mainly on the popularity and demand around your travel dates.
It depends on many factors like people want to go skiing during the winter, or on family vacations during the summer holidays, Europe is a popular destination around August.
During all these peak seasons, the flight tickets get really expensive.
So, travel to a destination during the shoulder season or off-peak seasons. In addition to flights, the prices of hotels will also be cheaper and you can save a ton of money.
There are a lot of countries which had been out of radar for travellers due to various reasons.
Countries like Myanmar, Laos, Poland, Hungary offer very cheap flight deals from time to time.
The best way to find these deals is to go to Google flights map view and explore destinations offering cheap flights. You can create alerts for a destination and book whenever you get a great deal.
The best thing to save more for the cheap flight deals is to get a free ticket for a flight. You can get a free flight by earning air miles and points.
Airline reward program is a great way to earn free flights, free companion tickets and free upgrades. You can sign up for an airline’s reward program you generally fly from irrespective of the fact that how often you fly.
Credit cars offer points as sign up bonus, for online shopping, and participating in partner's program. These points can be earned without flying or without paying any extra money, however, by booking flights you can earn more points.
Be careful about two things - avoid an expensive airlines to airlines mile conversion and don’t forget about points expiry dates, so that you don’t lose your precious miles
If you want to book inexpensive flight tickets then the best thing will be to search for the price of the tickets in other currencies.
The currency of one country is weaker than the currency of another country. Search for the price of the ticket in the currency of that country whose currency is weaker.
This tip is best if the currency of your home country is stronger or currently stronger than the currency of your destination country.
Sometimes the airlines by mistake post wrong fares that leads to a sudden fall in the price of the tickets. These are sold at a huge discounted price.
This error can take place due to many reasons like technical glitches, human error or mishaps in currency conversion. You just need to identify them at the right time and at the right place to save for your cheap flight tickets.
Websites like The Secret Flying and AirFare Watchdog can help you in searching the low fares of different airlines and provide booking facility also at that error prices.
This is a major saving technique for a budget flight deal.
Flight booking websites and airlines offers discounts to students. If you are a student or under the age of 26, you can also take benefit of these discount offers.
Generally, a discount of around 15- 30 percent is given to the students on the standard price of the tickets.
You can compare price and discount offers of the different websites and airlines and can save more but keep in mind to search secretly as suggested before.
The sure-shot way to get flight tickets is to regularly and secretly check websites like Skyscanner and Google flights in an incognito window of your browser.
Set alerts and check the prices regularly, you never know when you will come across a great deal.
Some of the famous myths related to cheap flights tickets are that the ticket price is not cheaper during Tuesday, searching secretly don’t lead to fallen prices, there are no errors on airline websites and many more. These tricks actually work and you need to ignore such myths.