WHERE TO BOOK CHEAP FLIGHTS?
The reason that most of us don’t travel is that we do not know exactly where to look when it comes to booking flights. Depending on where you book your flight, the flight prices could be quite different. Also, on certain days, booking a flight could be significantly cheaper. I book most of my flights on Tuesdays due to hearing it from many of my travel friends and reading it all over travel blogs. I remember booking a roundtrip flight from Newark to Thessaloniki on a Tuesday and it was around 700. For the past week before, I would stalk Expedia and the flight was close to 900. I was a bit curious as to why flights are so much cheaper on certain days, so I obviously used google and came up with this list of ‘Do’s and Don’ts’:
DO
Book 8 weeks ahead if you can (it might be difficult due to COVID-19)
Be flexible
fly mid-week if you can
fly in really early
Book on a Tuesday
Travel site FareCompare: “Tuesday morning to 3pm”
Travel site Hopper: “Book around midnight on Tuesday & you could save 6%”
DON’T
Book last minute
Book 7-13 days ahead, you will MOST likely pay more
Book on a Friday night
When I first started traveling I would use Expedia & I would just go to that specific airline’s website. But then I learned about Skyscanner, which is now my favorite site to use when I’m booking flights. Skyscanner is awesome because it compares millions of flights to find the cheapest deals and it’s also FREEEEE to use.
The site is pretty straight forward, however, let me take you on a Skyscanner tour.
So where exactly do you want to go? Hmmm, don’t know where to go??? Well, the sky is the limit, well not really if you’re on a budget haha! Okay, so let’s go with a flexible option, which is the “Go Everywhere” option, I live in South Jersey, so usually I choose JFK for international flights and Philadelphia Airport for domestic flights OR whichever one is cheaper…
Type in your closest airport then please type in ‘Everywhere’ to the destination that you could potentially be headed to due to the fact that it could be inexpensive…
Next you could choose the specific date if you have a date in mind, if not then you could be spontaneous again and choose “Whole month”, instead of a “specific date”.
Once you have clicked on the ‘whole month’ option, now you could either choose a specific month or the Cheapest month (you won’t really know which month skyscanner chooses for you, this definitely is my favorite option though). If you just want to get away soon or in the future then play around with the different months and see the variety of price ranges and locations.
If you just want to get away soon or in the future then play around with this and see what you get. Click away!!
Now you will see a list of options starting off at the cheapest country to travel to ONE WAY! So far we still don’t know the cheapest specific dates for these, but we do see that you could go to another destination in the U.S for around $41 one way, Costa Rica for $140, Puerto Rico for around $125, Panama for around $145, and even to Cuba for around $144. The list goes on and on…
From that list of amazing places, lets choose Cuba, I’ve always wanted to go to Cuba, so let’s see what kind of deals they have. You could either pay around $144 for a flight to Havana or $469 to Varadero. Ummmm I’m going to definitely go with Havana for $144, I’ll just swim to Varadero later haha. NOW, let’s take a look at booking a flight to Cuba!!!
One CON about using Skyscanner is that the prices tend to change, sometimes it’s off by a few dollars, but other times it’s off by A LOT! Flight prices are live and tend to change frequently.
ANYWAYS BACK TO BOOKING THIS FLIGHT!!!! As you can see, there are multiple flights in September for around $145.
Let’s choose Monday September 4th …. SHOW FLIGHTS PLEASE!
Once you hit the ‘Show Flights’ options then you will see the different airlines advertising their prices. You’ll also see the different times that you can book your flight. As you continue to scroll down, the prices will definitely increase. If you don’t have a preference for which airline or what time, then GO WITH THE CHEAPEST OPTION! A 5 AM flight isn’t really that bad, you can sleep by the pool or at the beach once you get to Havana !
PERFECTO! Let’s book the September 4th flight at 5:20 am for $143 with American Airlines.
You will then be directed to the site to put in all the necessary information in order to book your flight.
Thank you so much for reading this blog on booking a flight from Skyscanner. Hopefully I provided you with some helpful tips for booking a flight.
- Hulda