Tips for Cheap Airline Tickets

I want to share with you tips and hacks for cheap airline tickets. We are independent budget travellers that have been travelling 6 months a year for the past 20 years. We use a variety of strategies to get the best prices available on transportation, accommodations, insurance, food and beverages and experiences.

Airplane Tickets

Airfares can be very high but with a few simple but powerful tips they can be very low and in some cases free. Depending on the day, week or month a seat can be $1800 one day or $300 on another day or even later on the same day.

I use these 4 different strategies to get the cheapest flight.

1. Flexibility.The most important strategy is to be flexible on your travel dates. As budget travellers the dates we leave is not as important as the price.
2. Travel in the off or shoulder seasons; it is much cheaper than high season.  We find that shoulder seasons are the best. The weather is generally still really good but there are way less people which means cheaper prices for flights and accommodations.
3. Actively look for discounted prices and pricing errors through specialty websites. You can find links on www.budgetslowtravel.com/tools.
4. Use a travel loyalty credit card to accumulate points for reduced and free flights. Search on – compare credit cards canada – to find the latest offers. Many waive the 1st year annual fee and give you bonus signing points.

Airlines use complex algorithms for pricing their seats and seat prices are dynamic and changing frequently. There are two main things to keep in mind for getting the cheapest airfares. Find out what standard fares cost for your flights and know the prime booking times for the cheapest time period for the flights you want. You might want to try searching in incognito mode so that cookies and trackers are not placed. There is a theory that the more you go to a airline website the higher are the prices presented. In incognito mode your browser does not allow tracking.

I follow the prices on special flight tracker websites. You can find them on my Tools page. They are easy to use. I begin looking for fares that are 30-80% less than the standard fare.

For example, a standard roundtrip fare to Europe from Western Canada is about $1200. I usually pay $500 but have paid as low as $250. I begin looking at 12 months out and usually book 9-10 months out. In July, I booked 2 return business class flights from Calgary to Mexico for $225 each, 9 months out. I was able to take advantage of a spot sale and used some credit card loyalty points.

I do not use my points for all our plane travel. Many of the heavily travel routes have great sales so I prefer to pay cash for those flights. Other routes do not have a lot of flights so there is less competition and the flights do not go on sale often. On those flights I use my loyalty points.

Using these tips and hacks will find you cheap airline tickets so that you can have more money to spend on accommodations, car rentals or restaurants.