Searching for the cheapest airfares online can be a long and difficult process for many flyers. Finding a cheap price and a good deal for your airfares could take hours of searching and it could impede your travel plans. Whether it’s the cheapest ticket or the most worth-it, almost everyone wishes to find the best tickets when flying. Scoring a deal on a ticket can feel great, and in this article we will be sharing some tips on how to find the cheapest airfares.

1. Choosing The Airline

Before you start purchasing your tickets, you should decide which airline to fly on. If you’ve applied to a mileage program with an airline, you should stick to that airline unless the prices are absurdly high. If you’re going to bring several baggage onto the flight, you should choose a more mainstream airline rather than a budget airline, and if you’re only carrying a backpack or don’t have much baggage, you should most likely choose a budget airline. This is because budget airlines, such as Spirit, will usually charge much higher prices to bring baggage onto a plane and might have all sorts of hidden fees dealing with baggage. This is where they get a large portion of their money from. Medium-price or high-price airlines will allow you to bring free carry-on baggage, which could end up saving you money. 

2. Choosing The Date and Time

After you choose the airline, choose the date and time for the flight. Most of the time, airfares will be cheaper on the weekdays instead of the weekends, since more people travel on the weekends. If you have time to fly on the weekdays or if you are on a break, you should definitely do so since prices could be much cheaper. If you are able to fly on the weekdays, the cheapest tickets will usually be on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, the days in the middle of the week. The second part of choosing when you will fly is the time. Airfares will typically be the cheapest around noon or extremely in the morning. Flights during noon hours, such as 12PM – 3PM, interfere with lunch hours, so they will usually be cheaper. Flights that depart extremely early in the morning around or earlier than 8AM will most likely be the first flights of the day, which will make them cheaper. The overall trick is to find inconvenient times where not many people would desire to fly.

3. Other Strategies

On top of choosing an airline, date, and time, there are also several miscellaneous strategies to help find a cheap ticket. One of the most important is when you book the airfare. The best times to book a ticket are between 2-7 weeks before the flight. If you’re planning a trip several months in advance, airline tickets might not be cheap. However, under certain circumstances such as, if you’re planning on travelling during a holiday season, booking tickets months in advance could be cheaper since demand would be high in the weeks before the holiday. Don’t rush since airfares can change all the time. Another tip is to look through both one-way and round-trip fares. Surprisingly in some cases, round-trip fares can be more expensive than purchasing the tickets separately in one-way. You could also apply the strategies above to several airlines, and combine one-way tickets from different airlines to find an even cheaper price. The trick is to scan through all airline options and find the best prices. You should always make your final decision by checking through multiple airlines. Online-booking websites that aren’t limited to a single airline, such as Google flights, can help with this. 

Overall, finding cheap airfares isn’t as difficult or time-consuming as many people think. You don’t need to randomly search through multiple websites to find a lucky ticket. By using the  strategies above, you could find a desirable airfare much easier. You could even find unbelievable airline prices that you didn’t know existed. Next time you fly, apply these strategies when buying your ticket and see if they work!

Sources:

https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/spending/articles/insider-secrets-to-booking-cheap-airfare

Cover image: Business Insider