Multiple times in the last couple of years I was lucky enough to grab extremely cheap flights basically all around the world, but mostly between Europe and North America.

So for example I was able to book a roundtrip from Luxembourg to Sydney via London and Los Angeles for around 900 USD, or a trip from Amsterdam to Honolulu, Hawaii and back for around 370 USD, which was due to an error in an airline’s booking system.

 

Here are 5 basic rules for you to increase chances of getting good deals on flights:

1. Search on multiple search engines

When looking for a flight try not to dedicate yourself to only one search engine. There might be a huge variation of prices between different platforms e.g. skyscanner, kayak, momondo, google flights etc. So always compare the prices.
You will also notice that most of the search engines will redirect you to a third party company’s website offering the cheapest results. Many of those try to increase their margin by adding extra fees for certain type of credit cards, useless insurances or services you definitely don’t need. So be sure to check additional fees and possibly book with their preferred and therefore cheapest payment method.

 

2. Try to be flexible

If possible, try to have many different dates and times of departure and arrival in mind. Fares do vary a lot depending on date and time of travel. Chances of finding a cheaper flight for just a day before or after the intended day of travel are high.

 

3. Search from many different airports

Airlines tend to vary their prices from certain airports or between certain cities for various reasons like airport taxes, frequency of the route, pricing of competing airlines etc. So always search for alternative routings, even though you might lose a bit of time, have to travel further than intended or the routing does not seem to make sense in the first place.

For example I was once able to save some money on a trip to Las Vegas because I simply departed from Luxembourg instead of Frankfurt, which I originally planned to do. Although ironically ending up flying through Frankfurt  (LUX-FRA-ORD-LAS), which seemed to be idiotic in the first place, a flight from Frankfurt would have cost me around 300USD more than the alternative routing I chose. A plus though would be the little extra mileage earned on this itinerary for less money, which leads us to the next important point.

 

4. Earn and use Miles

I will briefly be explaining how to use the perks of frequent flyer programs in a different section of my blog, since there are just too many different possibilities of doing so.

I personally love earning and using on British Airways’ frequent flyer program “BA Executive Club”.  Compared to many other programs it seems to be easier to earn a decent amount of avios (miles) in a short period of time, even if you fly only a couple times a year.
For example: A roundtrip booking from Europe to North America or Asia would earn you enough miles to fly intraeuropean once (e.g. FRA-LHR) almost for free.

 

5. Take advantage of error fares and deals if they fit your schedule

In the past I got a couple of great deals by finding and booking so called error fares. Error fares are basically false prices, which you will be able to find on the internet sometimes if you’re lucky. Most of the times they can be found for the fact that airlines do not or forget to double-check on their prices of some of their routings, so it happens that prices are falsely calculated within their booking system. Some people even think that Airlines occasionally put them on the market on purpose, as known as “self-dump fares”.
Either way, if you’re lucky enough to find one of those “too-good-to-be-true” deals, act fast. Usually they only last for a couple of hours or even only minutes before the errors get fixed.

 

So basically that is it. It is really as simple as that. By following these basic and honestly quite simple “rules”, I was able to save quite some money on my travels.

Feel free to check out my other travel experiences and reviews on this website. There might be some more helpful and entertaining information for you to read. If you have any questions about me or traveling in general feel free to comment below or contact me. Happy Travels!