Finding Cheap Flights - Search Tools
Travel
- Finding Cheap Flights - Introduction
- Finding Cheap Flights - When Time Matters
- Finding Cheap Flights - When Place Matters
- Finding Cheap Flights - Search Tools
This post presents some tools you can use to put that knowledge you have learned into play to finally book your flight.
Unless you know where exactly you want to go, exploratory tools like Google Flights/Kayak Explore are a great way to start planning your itinerary. It is also helps you realize that the price of a ticket is not a pure function of distance travelled. Start by picking nearby airports and narrowing down your entry points to a region (this is really only applicable for 1-week+ international travel)
There are tons of blogs dedicated to finding cheap flights, so it’s often advisable to just check those whether you might be lucky with a particular sale etc. For US departures, TheFlightDeal has been the most reliable resource, for Europe departures, HolidayPirates and their local offsprings have a tremendous following.
Once you narrowed down your entry points or region, you want to plan your actual destinations on this trip and how to get around. For these cases, I usually use Skypicker and Skyscanner. Skypicker will show you how to get to various destinations with a lot of place and time flexibility and can also search across tickets (like Ryanair, easyJet, etc.). For a given pair, Skyscanner usually finds the cheapest online travel agency through which to book. On Skyscanner, you can specify to search whole months at a time.
If you are feeling lazy, GoEuro and Rome2Rio are travel search engines which take into account multiple modes of transportation as well as ground transportation to find the best possible route between two points.