Dear Gabbey: How do you score SWEET flight deals?
Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 9:00AM | 5 Comments Dear Gabbey, I’m going to New Zealand to snowboard sometime this summer (their winter). I have no idea where to start with finding a flight and would like some help. Do you have any tips? – Jenny
Jenny, dear - I am Gabbey… of course I have tips. Finding cheap flights can be a daunting task, especially when you’re travelling to locations you are unfamiliar with. I have a certain set of steps I take to find cheap flights and I’ll go ahead and outline them for you now. There are plenty of other ways to find cheap flights, but this is my method – take it or leave it.
Situation #1: You know where you want to go and (roughly) when
If you don’t know about Kayak, it’s fantastic. It works whether you are traveling domestically in the US, from US abroad or even between international destinations. Although the premise of Kayak is simple, finding the cheapest flights on it is not necessarily straight forward. If you already know where you want to go and when, the search process is easy. Enter in your beginning and ending locations and dates. I ALWAYS select flexible date search with +-3 days but my travel dates are usually flexible. I do highly recommend this option though. Also check the checkboxes next to “include nearby airports” and if you want, you can customize WHICH nearby airports are shown by clicking the “custom” link on top of each location.I think the “Compare sites” option is annoying, so I uncheck all of those boxes.
At this point, it is a good idea to look at the calendar shown to the right of the search boxes.
In this case, I had asked for flights leaving the 1st and returning the 8th. Notice that the flights at the end of this month are much cheaper (by over $200) and since I am flexible, I would rather go later in the month and save a few bucks. I will change my dates to 7/25 outbound and 8/5 return.
Kayak then chugs and plugs and scours the internet for all things flight goodness. The cheapest flight will pop back up at the top of the list. Make sure the selected dates hold the cheapest fares for the week.
Feel free to change the filters along the left hand side, but notice that these will usually eliminate the #1 cheapo flight. If the flight you want on is a non-stop, this is likely the cheapest flight out there. Your journey has ended, congrats. If your selected flight has connections, there still may be a cheaper option for you yet, or if not, at least you can make the most out of it.
Consider alternate transportation from your layover, or at least stay a couple days!
In the above example, the cheapest flight I found showed one stop on the outbound leg. If you click the “details” link below the flight information, the details of the flight will be expanded to show where and for how long your layover is.
In this example, the layover is in Brisbane, Australia for 3 hours. Turns out, I’ve never been to Australia, and the thought of popping into the Brisbane airport for 3 hours when I’ve come all this way, just really sucks. I wanna see a kangaroo.
Extend your layover, Option 1: Ground transportation
Sometimes booking flights to a certain airport are just pricey either because it’s a small airport or only serviced by budget airlines. Kayak searches SOME budget airlines, but not all. For example, you will find flights on cheap European airlines like Easyjet, but not Ryanair (though Ryanair is rumored to be joining Kayak in the near future). You will find budget Jet Blue, but not Southwest. So let’s say you want to travel from Tokyo to Malaga, Spain. Your cheapest option will be to book on Kayak from Tokyo to London and then to catch a budget European flight from London to Malaga. You should also look into ground transportation like trains and busses or even ferries (which can be great for traveling between locations like England and Ireland, or Spain and Morocco).
So how do you find those cheap budget airline flights when they’re not listed on Kayak? Well it takes a bit of work, but it can be done relatively easy. I start with wikitravel.org. Wikitravel is a great online encyclopedia of location specific travel knowledge. What I use wikitravel for more than anything else though, is to find out what airports are near a city and who flies there. Once you find a city on wikitravel, go down to the “Getting In” section and note the airports nearby (usually will be noted which are major hubs vs. budget hubs). Visit the airport’s sites directly and find a list of airlines flying into that airport. From there, you can visit the airlines directly and look on their “Where We Fly” or similar to figure out the best ways to get into a city. Ya, it’s a bit of a hunt, but you said you wanted cheap, not easy.
Extend your layover, Option 2: Stay a couple days
For this example, ground transportation between Brisbane and Auckland is not really feasible (definitely not for cheaper than a flight) but I want to see the town. I redo the search, but this time I set it up as a multi-city with a stop in Brisbane and Auckland. Los Angeles to Brisbane on 7/25, Brisbane to Auckland on 7/29 and Auckland to Los Angeles on 8/5. This search returns a flight that is $90 more expensive, but $90 and I get to add another country to my vaca? DUH! Now I am satisfied with my flight choices and move on.
Situation #2: You have no clue where or when you want to go, you just want out
If your travel plans are a bit more vague, a good idea is to start with a couple of different sites. First (if you’re based in the US), you should check out Airefare Watchdog. This site allows you to put in your home airport and it will send you weekly (or daily, if you’re into that sort of thing) digests of the best destinations based on years of trending data. This site is PERFECT for travelers who are based in a city but like to take spontaneous weekend getaways or don’t necessarily have a specific destination in mind.
Another great site to get used to is LastMinuteTravel.com. Last Minute Travel allows you to search for flights (or even better, packages) to certain locations at the last minute. Ok, well not LITERALLY at the last minute, but let’s say my travel plans change, and I want to book a ticket to New Zealand tomorrow.
Yes, that is correct; $1000 for a flight that leaves tomorrow. Not a bad deal at all.
Finally, we head back to Kayak for their “deals” section which allows you to search for deals from a city to a continent. I use this feature A LOT. Try searching from LAX to Europe and see what happens. You’ll often find great packages and deals you wouldn’t find elsewhere. If nothing else, it gives a place to find inspiration on where you actually want to go.
If you’re not sure what’s a good deal and what’s not, a good site to check out is farecompare.com which allows you to enter in a starting and ending location and will give you a range of typical airline prices grouped by travel month.
Rookie Mistake – Hidden fees on budget airlines
Don’t look like a n00b. Budget airlines advertise discount fares often times because the LOAD on the hidden fees. Ryanair is a prime example and the punch line of many-a-joke about hidden airline fees (from fees to use the restroom to seatbelt fees). But you really need to take that into consideration. Once when traveling from London to Galway, I found that I could save a day of traveling and pay only slightly more (advertised) to fly rather than boat/train/drive/bus. However, after beginning the booking process (and already having decided on flying rather than the alternative) I paid an extra €5 for them to print my boarding pass out for me (no printer), an extra €15 for a checked bag, then €30 in airport surcharges, an €8 fee to use a Visa credit card and Finally when I arrived at the airport, I found that my oversized bag was liable for an additional £56 in fees! I ended up paying double of ground transport because I was lured in by the cheap adverts.
Dear Gabbey, budget, travel in Travel Tips 
