6 Ways to Find Cheap Flights

Sharing is caring!

Want to travel cheap? Of course you do. Nobody likes paying for overpriced airfare. Here’s how to find cheap flights any time of year.

1. Use Google Flights or Skyscanner to Search for Flights

Skip sites like Priceline or Kayak or whatever travel search website you’re currently using. Head to Google Flights or Skyscanner instead. These sites display the most flight options and allow you to perform searches that include additional nearby airports and even a map so you can see the cheapest destinations available worldwide. You can also sign up for price drop alerts so you’ll be notified if the airfare drops. And for us visual folks trying to find the cheapest flights, there are charts and graphs that display options and highlight the cheapest fares. Just about every airline will show up, too, save for Southwest, which means you’ll have to search their site separately. After you’ve used their search tool, go directly to the airline website to book.

2. Sign up for Email Alerts

Airfarewatchdog.com is a great resource for having cheap flights sent directly to your inbox. You can choose a departure city (or several) or a destination and get fare price alerts as often as you’d like. You can also use the website to search for flights, but it actually uses sites like Orbitz and Expedia for search results, so in my opinion, Airfarewatchdog.com is more useful as a price alert tool so you can book travel when it’s cheapest.

3. Search for Cheap Flights One Person at a Time

I’ve personally dealt with this hack. No matter how many people are traveling with you (unless it’s more than four, because who wants to book seven separate flights?), search for airfare one ticket at a time. Frequently airlines will offer seats at different prices and if they have one cheap seat left but you’re searching for two tickets, you won’t even see that lower fare. You could save a few dollars or you could save a few dozen depending on where you’re flying.

4. Search Nearby Airports

We live in Austin. Our family lives in Southwest Ohio. When flying home for the holidays when airfare is notoriously expensive (darn you, supply and demand!), we searched for cheap flights from every airport within two hours of our departure and destination cities. It was always the cheapest to fly out of Austin, but flying into Indianapolis instead of Dayton, Columbus or Cincinnati, offered a savings of over $20 per ticket. Just make sure to check the price of transportation to get to your final destination to make sure the cheap flight is worth it. In our case, family would pick us up, so we lucked out.

5. Search One-Way Flights

Almost all domestic airlines price their flights in one-way segments these days, but the point of this method is to search different airlines. Using Google Flights or Skyscanner, search for each part of the journey separately. On a recent booking, we found the cheapest flight to our destination was on United but the cheapest flight on the way home was on Allegiant. If we had searched for round-trip tickets we would have paid quite a bit more for airfare.

6. Book Connecting Flights Separately

This doesn’t work in every situation, but if you’ve budgeted the time for this sort of travel, it’s well worth searching separately for individual legs of a journey. This usually works best for finding longer, international cheap flights, but occasionally domestic flights can work, too. We did this on our way back from Australia. Instead of purchasing one very long-haul flight from Perth to Boston with layovers in Melbourne and LA, we booked a cheap flight on a budget airline from Perth to Melbourne where we had a 12-hour layover and enjoyed the city for a day, then from Melbourne to Honolulu where we enjoyed a 10-day stopover, then a separate flight from Honolulu to Boston. Even with all the different flights and transactions we saved money on the tickets and got to break up our flights and enjoy Hawaii. Note that this only works if you plan for long layovers. The second airline isn’t going to cut you a break if the first arrives late or some such. Keep in mind you’ll have to pick up baggage in between flights, too.

7. Sign up for Frequent Flier Programs

Once you know what airlines fly to your preferred destinations, sign up for their frequent flier programs (almost all are free). Then, once you’re set to start earning, start racking up the points. You can then use miles you earn in a variety of ways (not just flying) to book nearly free travel. In the meantime, make sure to opt-in to daily or weekly emails so you’ll get notified when the airline is having a fare sale.

Bottom Line

Flexibility and a willingness to think outside the box are key when it comes to finding the cheapest flights. But keep searching and wander on!