How to Hack to A Flight
Since flights are usually the most expensive part of any trip, I thought I’d deal with this subject first. Finding a cheap flight is easier said than done these days. Routes and capacity have been cut and oil prices have risen. The combination of all three has lead to higher fares that are only going up. Flexibility is key to finding cheap flights, as deals are sometimes around for only a few hours. A day can mean the difference of hundreds of dollars. But if you need flights on a certain date, then you need to work the system a bit.
Let’s look at an example. Say I am flying from New York City to London. This is a popular route, and is served by a lot of airlines. I picked the date October 17th with a return date of October 27th.
Step 1: Use a site like Kayak as your baseline. They search multiple websites at once so you can see prices across the board. Moreover, I also like how they let you search a few days before and after your selected date. In the US, I also like Travelocity, but there are tons of good aggregators around the world.
Kayak returned these results for flying from New York to London:
Step 2: Cross check with other, more global aggregators like Skyscanner, or Momondo to see what they come up with. These two are my favorite as they tend to search a wider range of booking sites as well as discount airline carriers. I never book a flight without checking these sites first. (Two other good ones are Mobissimo and Vayama.)
Skyscanner results:
Momondo results:
Step 3: Find the lowest fare and head to that airline’s website to see if it is less. Sometimes airlines price tickets less on their own websites than they do on aggregators as a way to entice people to book directly. As we see above, the lowest fare is $592.19 USD on a low-cost airline called Mandarin Airlines (actually, when you click the link it sends you to Astraeus Airline) with Iceland Express next at $676 USD. I couldn’t find a booking form on Astraeus (they are a charter operation partially owned by Iceland Air) but checking on the Iceland Express website, we see the price is the same:
Step 4: Next, check the airline’s foreign website to see if the price is cheaper in another currency. (i.e. britishairways.co.uk instead of britishairways.com) Depending on your currency, you might be able to take advantage of the exchange rate and book in another currency while getting charged in your own currency, thereby saving money. On our example, this doesn’t work because we are going from the United States to England and the English Pound is worth more than the US dollar.However, if we were going the reverse way, this would work. I’ve used this method when flying to New Zealand since their currency is worth less than the US currency. Recently, a bunch of people used a loophole where they could buy Iceland Air points in Krona and transfer those to Alaskan Airways, then use those points and end up with a first class ticket to Hawaii for $300 USD!
Step 5: Try various routes. Most major airports have expensive fees and taxes that can add a lot of money to the price of a ticket. I like to check other big airports and then see if taking a discount flight to my final destination is cheaper. This is especially good in Europe since they have so many airlines. For our example, maybe flying to Dublin is cheaper, and then I can just take a quick Ryanair flight over to London. (Turns out, in our example, it isn’t.)
Step 6: See who flys into the airport you want to land at. One thing I do quite a bit is to go to the airport’s website and see what airlines fly into it. Sometimes you find small carriers that are not listed on aggregators or other search engines. This is sort of my last double check to make sure I checked all possible airlines. After all, I don’t want to find out later that there was an airline that offered a cheap flight but wasn’t listed on an aggregator. (Not all airlines appear on flight search engines.)
After I do all that checking and work, I might look at a few more websites and search for a lot of deals if I’ve found big differences between the numbers. Moreover, it is also good to play around with the dates of your trip. Sometimes leaving a few days before or after can make a big difference in price. In our example, it didn’t really make a huge difference when I looked at it. Most of the major airlines were much higher than what we found during that period:
So our $593 USD flight to London on Astraeus airline looks to be the best deal and is more than $200 USD cheaper than most of the major airlines and $100 USD cheaper than Iceland Express. Notice that Astreaus only appeared on 1 booking site and that booking site was not US-based. That’s why it is so important to check multiple sites from all over the world, because not all sites check all airlines. All this work took me about 45 minutes. While $200 USD isn’t a lot of money, spending 45 minutes to save $200 USD is worth it for me because that is $200 USD more I now have for my trip!
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Much (!) more great info at:
How to Be a Travel Hacker | Nomadic Matt's Travel Site
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