How to find a cheap flight?

When preparing for your trip, once the destination is confirmed, the major issue remains how to find a cheap flight!

With the covid crisis, the bankruptcy of major travel companies and the soaring price of kerosene, aviation has never been so expensive and the era of low-cost tickets is clearly over!

Transportation indeed represents a good portion of the travel budget, especially if you have chosen remote destinations! Keep your money for your vacation and not for transportation with these few tips you absolutely must know before buying your ticket!

1. Use a good flight comparison site.

This may seem obvious and yet! Many don't take the time to really scour the web looking for the best fare, or prefer to take the flight recommended by the agency. Your favorite travel agency certainly has access to preferential rates (less and less nowadays), but it also applies a margin on the duty-free price of the ticket, because it has to remunerate itself! There are other undeniable advantages related of course to after-sales service and potential problems, but here, we're talking purely about fares and good deals, so we absolutely use flight comparison sites.

We love Google flights above all for its calendar showing the prices offered on each date. If you're flexible, it's an excellent first tool to determine when to leave. This will save you from trying a thousand date combinations until finding the cheapest one! Its 'explore' function is also very appreciable if you lack inspiration, as it gives you at a glance, round-trip prices to all possible destinations from your departure city. Google flight isn't necessarily the easiest for purchase redirection, but it's a good first step to rough out your travel plans and find the most advantageous dates.

Kiwi.com has moved up a gear. Here, it's no longer a simple old-fashioned flight comparison site. The Czech company focuses on budget travel and mixes seasoned traveler tips with new technologies to show you what airlines would prefer to hide from you! They describe themselves as system hackers! They have the same calendar system as Google flights. Here are some of their services that make the difference.

• Self-transfer: You can combine a plane with a bus or train in one reservation, to have more choices and better fares on a route you wouldn't have imagined yourself.
• Hidden cities: a first at kiwi, you can take a ticket with a stopover in your final destination city and 'forget' the second part of the journey. It may seem crazy, but it's sometimes more interesting to get off along the way! Some cities are indeed more popular than others!
• Throwaway tickets: Airlines surcharge one-way tickets. It's preferable to always choose a round trip. Kiwi has decided to always offer you the most advantageous fare, even if it's a round trip when you only asked for a one-way! It's up to you to choose whether to use the return or not!

Cocorico, here's the newest flight comparison site and it's 100% French! Innovative criteria, such as ecological consideration that tells you which flight emits the least carbon on your route, a modern interface, without ads and easy access, clear navigation and always a proposal of the three best flights before drowning you in information. Ulysse is not just a comparison site, it's also a travel agency. So you can manage your reservation, take their no-reason cancellation insurance and talk to real people if you have a problem! The ultimate luxury today, in this age of call centers relocated to the other side of the world where no one ever manages to help you.

No hidden fees that appear every two clicks, the price shown at the start is the one you're going to pay! Unless of course you add options yourself.

The dean of the party, Skyscanner, is perhaps the best known and most used flight comparison site. And rightfully so! Skyscanner has the knack for finding the most advantageous fares! You don't have to choose an airport! You can simply define the country you want to go to and the robot will offer you different options! And if you have no ideas, you can simply click on 'everywhere' and let yourself be tempted!

Algofly, as its name suggests, uses an algorithm in addition to its search comparison engine. It compares your result to statistics and the price curve history observed in previous years on the same destination. It will therefore show you the best market prices, but also whether they are likely to drop or if on the contrary, you've just found a golden deal and can't let it pass!

The Danish flight comparison site is like its country, clear and orderly! The use is simple and the interface very visual. Graphics show you price evolution and give you advice on the best time to buy your flight or information about the different companies offering your route or the most interesting month to go where you want to go!

2. Be flexible

You understood by looking at your flight comparison sites, prices can go from single to double or even triple depending on the chosen date. So, it's true that not everyone has the chance to be able to leave off-season, or take their vacation as they please, but whenever possible, it's very important to be able to be flexible by at least one or two days.

Avoid traveling on weekends as much as possible.We prefer traveling between Tuesday and Thursday.

Schedules can also influence fares. If you're not afraid of getting up at dawn or sleeping at the airport, don't hesitate to look at fares for flights at impossible times! Harder to fill, they are often a bit cheaper.

The same goes for days when no one wants to travel! Like Christmas and New Year's Day!

And don't forget the calendar of the country where you're going! Their major holidays, traditional festivals or special celebrations! (Chinese New Year, Rio carnival, Semana Santa etc.)

3. Look for the hub

Airlines operate on the Hub principle. They all have to go through their reference airport. If you travel with Air France and leave from the provinces, you will necessarily go through Paris even if you have the impression of 'going backwards'. So think about your company's hub, and see if you can't finish the trip yourself!

For example, if you're going to Southeast Asia, you can look directly at your final destination, but you can also zoom out your mind and observe the big hubs surrounding it. You can perfectly find a cheaper flight to Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, spend a few days there (or not) and continue your journey with a local low-cost flight or even in some cases, thanks to public transport!

4. Choose your moment

Finding the best travel dates is not enough, you also need to know when to book! Packing your bags and taking a last-minute ticket at the airport for next to nothing is a myth we only see in movies! Companies have a certain number of seats per category within each booking class. When the cheapest ones are sold out, you fall into the higher price bracket.

Booking in advance (3 months will suffice) is an important guarantee in obtaining a good price. Then, it's true that companies update their sites and can put more interesting fares back on sale. They say you should look Tuesday night, but it's not an exact science! In any case, what's certain is that you should avoid looking for your ticket between 6pm and 10pm! Rush hour after work! Set the alarm and do your searches before 6am in the morning!

5. Go look elsewhere

Flight ticket prices can sometimes vary according to the country of purchase! It's not normal, I grant you, but it's true! Companies also set their prices according to travelers' wallets. Don't hesitate to do this little test. Look for web extensions of countries where the selected company operates and redo your search with the new extension after .com (.es, .it, .ca; .mx, .ar.) It's not true for all companies and doesn't work every time, but you could find significant differences on the same flight, so it's worth trying!

6. Travel incognito

You certainly know this, but you don't do it systematically anyway, remember to do your searches in incognito mode! Clear your history, empty your cookies, and switch to private browsing. You can also activate VPN (Virtual Private Network) if you have one.

Prices increase as your search progresses! Result, you're afraid it will get worse and you hurry to buy!

7. Think low cost

Low-cost airlines don't appear on flight comparison sites, simply because they refuse to pay them commissions. For your trips in Europe, you know very well how to use EasyJet or Ryanair. But as soon as we go a bit further, we don't know how to go about it anymore!

Recent times have been very complicated for airlines, big or small. Some have closed down, others have been largely helped by their country. And in the middle of all that, others were born.

Alongside your search, via comparison sites, check if there's a low-cost airline you wouldn't have thought of for your destination. Like for example the Norwegian long-haul low-cost airline 'Norse Atlantic' which offers flights to the United States for less than 200€!

Once arrived, you might also need a domestic flight. So look for what are the low-cost airlines of the continent where you are! Tiger Airways and Air Asia will offer you flights as low as €10 in Asia and Spirit airlines in the United States offers a wide range of rock-bottom prices across the country and Central America! If you wanted to mix a stay in Los Angeles and a week in Mexico, it will be much more interesting to take a round trip Paris-Los Angeles and another domestic round trip LA-Cancun!

8. Always take a round trip

The basics. A one-way flight is never worth it (except low-cost airlines). Moreover, some destinations require a return ticket to board! After that, you can be lucky and leave for years of travel with just a one-way ticket in your pocket, or find yourself at the airport, forced to quickly buy a return ticket to have the right to board (trust me, in both cases, it's lived experience!).

So, one of two things. If you want the freedom to travel without time constraints, or expatriate abroad, and don't want to buy a round trip, know that there's a specialized site (One Way Flight), which provides you with return ticket proofs for €19 regardless of destination. Be careful, these aren't real tickets, you won't be able to travel with them. They're simply valid return flight reservation proofs for 14 days and will cancel since the flight won't be paid. Entirely legal, no problem on that side.

However, if you think you'll return, but don't know when, it will always be more advantageous to take a round trip. Check the conditions well and make sure your ticket is modifiable, preferably at low cost. You can then change your return date (be careful of possible fare differences).

Sometimes it even happens that the round trip is actually cheaper than the one-way! In this case, don't hesitate. You'll just have to cancel your return flight (don't forget that some airport taxes from an unused flight are refundable!). Be careful though, this doesn't work the other way around! If you don't board the outbound flight for any reason, your return flight is lost!

9. Check deal sites

Some sites specialize in finding good deals. This is the case of the French 'Voyages Pirates' for example. They look for promotions or pricing errors for you and get paid by taking a commission on the price. So don't panic, you won't pay anything more than the displayed price! You can also check the 'Secret Flying' site or 'Holidayguru'.

In the 'good deals' category, don't forget to look at your stopovers!! You're going to Costa Rica and your flight stops 3 hours in Miami or New York? Why not turn those 3 hours into 3 days? Most of the time, this will cost you nothing or almost nothing and you will have had a little stay in New York without having to spend anything extra!

You can do it yourself, by breaking down the flight in two, once you've seen which stopover your company makes or by calling customer service to modify the second segment (again, both cases are lived experience, and both work!)

10. Think multi-destination

If you're going on a big trip and you're going to cross a large country like Australia, the United States or Canada, or you're visiting two countries like Peru and Bolivia or you want to end your safari in Tanzania with 4 days in Zanzibar, especially don't buy your ticket before having your travel plan in mind and validated!

Taking an arrival and departure from the same city can be extremely constraining and make you lose precious time trying to retrace your steps!

The typical example in the United States is to arrive in Los Angeles and leave from San Francisco! In Australia, don't hesitate to arrive in Cairns and leave from Melbourne, in Canada, arrive in Vancouver and leave from Calgary, or arrive in Peru in Lima and leave from La Paz in Bolivia.

Flight comparison sites offer the multi-destination option. You just have to fill in your travel dates, the price is calculated like a round trip and not like two one-ways.

This will also allow you to do a portion of the trip by land or via domestic low-cost flights.

You now have all the keys in hand to be smarter than the system and find the cheapest flight ticket on the market!

Have a great trip!