How do you book cheap tickets?

Real World Aviation
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Hello!

This might be in the wrong category, so feel free to change it.

I know a lot of you in this forum are frequent flyers. Flying is expensive, so I would think that y’all have a couple tricks up your sleeve to save some moola while booking flights. So, what tips do you have for saving money while booking flights?

Thanks!

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Expedia is the way to go I think!

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Booking on the airlines website is a way, they normally offer the cheapest deals and give you promotion deal such as (Hotel, car rentals and etc) along with it, depending on the airline though.

If you consider this idea, you should always look for is when airlines advertise sales of destination there offering since you’re guaranteed for a bargin. Best way to look out for it is by writing your email address to the airline you normally fly and lookout for special deals.

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I don’t know how this thing works in other countries/airlines, but in Colombia, Avianca has a frequent flyer card and a point reward system called LifeMiles. This points can be collected by buying in some stores, gas stations and in the internet with the LifeMiles card, and they can be used for buying tickets and hotel rooms. So we use this card a lot, and my dad is a frequent flyer so we collect a lot of points. One time we saved around 120 dollars in the airplane ticket, even we got upgraded to business in the return flight.

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If you have a VPN I’ve seen people literally change the country they connect to and the price will decrease

(A third world country)

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I generally use Google, and then it shows me the prices for each date of the month and what airlines, how many stops, etc… which then gives me a chance to choose the cheapest/best option and then I can click on the external website (airline site) and book from there.

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https://www.google.com/travel/flights

Google flights is the way to go. Best and cheapest prices by airline and date.

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Google flights is the way to go imho. Play around with dates and destinations, but if you open up to anything, you’ll find some steals. I’d also say low cost carriers like Spirit and Allegiant are a great alternative for a saving some money. I personally usually fly Southwest because of the two free bags included which is a lifesaver.

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For me, I can usually book a FC ticket for under 100 bucks if I do it correctly. It’s a little travel hack that I figured out

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Check out Momondo

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Do you know if the VPN trick works with Google flights, booking websites (Expedia, etc.), and airline websites?

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Honestly I dont think it would make a difference. Google flights is def the way to go for flights. The most useful feature for me is the ability to add multiple airports to a search. For example, I can look for flights to somewhere from JAX, MCO, DAB, GNV, and SAV. These are all within 2ish hours of home and sometimes you can snag a great deal.

Then you can also book on the airlines website instead of a sketchy third party.

You can also add alerts to see if the fare goes down over time.

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Please enlighten me with your travel hacking ways

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Easy. What I do usually is book a economy extra seat and than when I check in if the airline has FC seats available they’ll ask if you want to upgrade and I usually say yes. I usually do a dollar per minute of flight time to be worth it. IE. if AA is asking me to upgrade to a FC seat on a 50 minute flight for 80 dollars I won’t do it. But if they ask me if I want to upgrade my seat to FC for 80 dollars and the flight is an hour and a half or 2 hours than I’ll do it

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Ah, ok, cool. Thanks

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Its a wonderful way to fly. I think either @N1DG or I made a topic on it.

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To everyone saying book through Expedia or google flights, be very careful. Most of the times the airlines won’t give out a full refund if u dont book through there website. Just like hotels.

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Top tips for booking cheap tickets with cash:

  1. Always planing in advance and having flexibility with travel dates saves you money.
  2. Always look for flights on travel websites like Expedia and then go to the airlines website to book the flight.
  1. If you want to fly a specific airline, sometimes booking flights on a partner’s airlines website might be cheaper. For example sometimes you can book LH flights on United’s website for less than on Lufthansa’s.
  2. Flights are cheaper when demand goes down. For example I start looking tickets from the US to Greece in December/January for June. Last winter when there was no air travel, there were great deals, especially for business class. I was able to find round trip flights with SWISS Business for around $2,000 round trip, when they usually cost double or triple the price (unfortunately prices have jumped back up). This sometimes occurs with seasonal drops in demand for destinations.

Top tips for booking tickets with miles:

Booking tickets with miles can be more difficult than with cash, the extra trouble usually pays off.

  1. USE ETIHAD MILES TO BOOK AA FLIGHTS!!! Since Etihad uses AA’s old miles chart before devaluation, you can fly AA Business and first with much fewer miles than the competition. If you have a Capital One Venture card you can transfer miles to Etihad at a 1:1 ratio. The only nuisance is you have to call Etihad to book flights which can be a pain. But you can’t beat flying round trip from the US to Australia for 125,000 miles round trip or from the US to Tokyo for 100,000 miles! That would be worth $1,250 or $1,000 respectively if you redeemed the Capital One miles for airfare (which is what my parents usually do.) I recently found out about this but I haven’t tried this out yet. I hope I can maybe get my parents to redeem the miles on AA’s JFK-ATH flight next year.
  1. I also know that Avanica can also have good offers, but they are probably not as good as AA’s and are only for trans-Atlantic travel.
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I use an app called brave that does not let the airline’s website know you already searched. You can also clear your cache after you visit the site just a pain to do it all the time.