How to Find Cheap Tickets
By Isaiah David
If you love to travel but have to do it on a budget, you already know how important it is to find cheap airline tickets. For a family of four, buying cheap tickets can mean hundreds of dollars in savings, but even for solo travelers a discount ticket can make a difference. Spending less money on your ticket means that you have more leftover to play golf on new and exciting courses and enjoy the other luxuries of your vacation.
Instructions
Difficulty: Moderately Easy
Find an inexpensive time to travel. In most areas, fall is the off-season so autumnal travel will usually save you some money on airline tickets. You can also save money by buying tickets for flights departing on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and avoiding flights that leave on Saturdays. If you don't mind early mornings or late nights, you should also consider flying on a red eye.
Look at the prices offered by online travel agencies. Because there are many travel agencies, you may want to use a website such as Kayak that searches all the travel agencies and shows you their prices.
Use a ticket bidding service such as Priceline if you don't have the time to spend picking up tickets. Enter your travel dates along with how much you want to pay for a ticket. The site will keep searching until it finds a ticket at that price. If there are no tickets available at your current price, you can simply put in a higher value and have it search some more until it finds a ticket.
Go to the websites of the airlines which fly out of your airport. Sometimes an individual air carrier will offer discounts on tickets sold through its website. These discounts won't show up on Kayak or on individual airline travel agency websites.
Check back whenever you have a chance, and record the lowest prices you find each day. Websites update their ticket prices several times every day, so you need to keep coming back if you want to get the best deals. If you can, check out ticket prices twice every day, including weekends.
Register for the frequent flier programs of the airline you book a flight on and make sure your flight is counted toward your frequent flier miles. Frequent flier programs will give you discounts or sometimes entirely free flights if you use an airline frequently enough.
Tips & Warnings
If you happen to be shopping for tickets the last minute, look at the package deals on the travel company websites. Sometimes you can actually find a package with accommodations included for less than the price of a typical ticket.
About The Author
Isaiah David is a freelance writer and musician living in Portland, Ore. He has nearly five years' experience as a professional writer and has been published on various online outlets. He holds a degree in creative writing from the University of Michigan.
