Travelling is one of the greatest ways to log off from the stress of life. However, planning the trip can be a downright existential hell-scape. So here are five tips when it comes to booking your next flight out!
1. Be Flexible With Your Travel Dates
Most people approach buying a flight ticket in three steps: Picking a destination, deciding on the dates for their trip and then, looking up available flights. Typically, this results in soaring prices. If getting a cheaper flight is one of your priorities, flip the approach. Check out the airline prices to your destination by being flexible with your dates. A couple of days before or after your preferred date might make a whole of a difference.
2. Check Alternative Airports
When it comes to touching down in some of the world’s large destinations, it’s likely that there will be more than one airport. For example, New York boasts Newark, JFK and LaGuardia while London has Gatwick, Stansted and Heathrow. So before you book your flight, check all the available arrival points, and include the cost of transfers into the city centre in your final calculation for a fair comparison.
3. Travel Day Trumps Booking Day
Countless industry pundits have repeatedly claimed that Tuesday is the best day of the week to buy flight tickets. It has somewhat been established as a ‘known fact’. However, analysis from CheapAir has concluded that it does not matter which day you buy your tickets – what matters is your travel day. Cheapest days to fly according to CheapAir are Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
4. Find The Optimum Day To Book Your Flight
While the particular day of the week that you book may not make a difference in price, the amount of lag time you have before your flight certainly does. Most travellers think the earlier the better when it comes to bagging bargains in the air, but statistics have shown that an estimated of 54 days before your flight is the best time to book trips.
5. Rely On Useful Flight Search Engines
To stay on top of see-sawing airfares, passengers need certain tools to keep them ahead of competition. The classic ones are of course, CheapAir and Skyscanner. Apart from these, Google has an incredible tool that almost no one has heard of – Google Flights Explorer. You can easily find cheap deals to anywhere in the world through this tool.
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