Low Airline Tickets
One of the most common questions I run across is how someone can find low airline tickets prices — what sites they should be looking for, or what site they should buy from. The simplest answer I can give to that question is that finding low airline tickets prices is much, much more complicated than that. Airline pricing is set by rules, restrictions, and availability for given fares, meaning that one airline might be cheaper one day than the next, for the same route. These are some of the things you should keep in mind when looking for low airline tickets:
1. Don’t wait until too late to purchase. The vast majority of fares available at the lowest price have advance purchase requirements that are 14 or 21 days in advance. In fact, you should start looking before then, to see if you catch the occasional sale on your route. Waiting until the last minute is almost never a good idea if you can avoid it — contrary to popular belief, airline tickets get more expensive as you get closer to the date of departure.
2. If you’re looking for low airline tickets for holiday travel, buy as soon as possible. People traveling for Thanksgiving and Christmas often face the busiest crowds and the highest demand of any leisure travelers during the year, so airlines don’t have as much incentive to offer sales or discounts to those travelers — they know that people are going to want to travel during those periods. If you know you’re going to travel during those periods, buy your tickets as soon as you can — they’ll only tend to increase as availability goes down.
If you do have the flexibility, travel during the slower periods of the holidays — the holidays themselves. Prices on Christmas Day, for example, will tend to be lower than the days immediately before or after.
3. Choose slower days for travel. Though it’s not always the case, most of the low airline tickets that offer the cheapest fares are for travel on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays. Though it’s always possible to find deals on other days of the week, these are the days that are probably best for starting your search.
4. Consider alternate airports. Many major cities in the US have multiple airports to choose from, such as New York (with LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark all within a few miles) and Chicago (with O’Hare and Midway). If you want to fly to San Francisco, check out prices to Oakland and San Jose. If you want to fly to Miami, check out Fort Lauderdale. And if you’re flying to Los Angeles, don’t forget that you can choose from Burbank, Ontario, and Orange County Airports as well.
5. Be flexible. This is, perhaps, the most important thing you can do if you’re looking for low airline tickets prices. Flexibility is key – with the dates you travel, with the airline you choose, and so on. Even by moving your travel dates by a day in either direction, you could save hundreds of dollars due to the complexity of airline pricing.
Travelocity.com is a good site for searching for airfare using a flexible search – meaning that you don’t even need to know your dates of travel! – in order to find the lowest fare for your destination. You can even use Travelocity to book your hotels, car rental, or train tickets – or if you want to buy everything as a package, they can do that as well. Travelocity even has special packages available for last-minute travelers.
If you have even more flexibility — meaning you don’t care what time of the day you fly, the airline you are flying, or even the number of connections — consider a site such as Hotwire. If you have the flexibility to fly at any time, on any route, and with any airline, you can save as much as 40% off the regular price. Hotwire offers similar savings on car rentals and hotels as well, meaning you can pick up similar deals for the rest of your trip.
