The Best Ways To Find A Deal On An Airline Ticket

I hate buying airline tickets. Why can’t there just be one standard pricing system across the board when it comes to buying a ticket. If an airline came into business that could charge set prices for a certain route and still make money, they’d be billionaires. My wife and I are going out to California this summer, and we started looking for tickets to go out there about a week ago. The tickets were in the $400 to $450 dollar range. This was not acceptable. We couldn’t afford to spend $900 on the tickets when we still need to pay for a hotel, rental car, food, and entertainment while we’re out there. So, we started scrounging through the depths of the internet to find any deal possible, and our hard work paid off last night. We found a ticket for $300 a piece, so the $900 we thought we were going to spend quickly turned into $600. Here are the seven things that I learned about how to find the best deals on the internet for airline tickets.

1. Check little known websites. My wife and I found our tickets on STA Travel. My wife is still a student, so we were allowed to purchase from this site. Every now and then, you can find discounted deals from top-tier airlines.
2. Check multiple times a day. There really is no rhyme or reason to when you can find a better deal, even though many people say that Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday nights are the cheapest times to buy a ticket. It just so happened that we found ours on a tuesday and my mom’s ticket out of Atlanta on a Wednesday, but instead of relying on this unconfirmed rumor, just check multiple times day, EVERY day of the week.
3. Check airlines’ headquarters for flights. For instance, check out flights for Delta if you live near Atlanta.
4. Be flexible on your flying dates. It’s definitely a fact that flying on a Tuesday or a Wednesday is cheaper than most other days of the week. If you’re taking a one week trip and you can fly from a tuesday to a tuesday, you’ll find great rates. This is what we did.
5. Start your search early. We didn’t do this, and we were lucky to find a good deal. You need to allow at least 21 days in advance to find a great deal. Every now and then you can find the last-minute deals, but those are rare.
6. Don’t forget Spirit Air. SpiritAir.com is a great value airline that offers quite a few flights. They are especially good for a flight to the Caribbean.
7. Know an airline’s strengths. An example of this is Jet Blue. Jet Blue has great rates for east coast flights such as New York to Orlando, but they are horribly uncompetitive going from east coast to the west coast.

If you have any more tips, I would love to hear them. This is always such a frustrating process for me, because I can never stomach paying $500 for a domestic flight. I understand that gas prices are contributing to the higher prices, but it seems like airlines can’t afford to lose business to price-sensitive fliers.

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