Simple Tricks That Save Money When Booking Flights You Need to Know

"It is also always a good idea to check other flight search engines such as Kayak or Google Flights to make sure you don’t miss any deals before booking."

- The Infographics Show

Simple Tricks That Save Money When Booking Flights You Need to Know is a video on the Infographics Show sharing hellishly simple tricks to save impressive amounts of money when booking flights.

Synopsis
With summer rapidly approaching and the vaccine offering signs of slowing the coronavirus pandemic, people have their minds on travel after being locked in for over a year. But before you go purchasing that plane ticket to your fantasy getaway, you NEED to know these flight hacks! These deals could end up saving you hundreds, don't miss out!

Transcript
We all want to get away sometimes, but traveling can be expensive. Fear not, because we’re here to help with some cheap flight hacks you can use right now. There are few key things you need to do when looking for flights to ensure you find the best prices.

Data analysts that have sifted through airfare prices and statistics have concluded that the factors which most directly impact how much you pay for a plane ticket are: your departure day, how long you are staying for, the airport you’re flying to, and how far in advance you book your tickets. Keeping these things in mind, one of the best ways to make sure you get the cheapest flights possible is to be flexible. We will come back to this later on as we explore the best hacks that allow you to fly cheaply when you have time off.

Before you even think about searching for plane tickets you must do one thing. It is the only way to make sure that the airline companies don’t jack up their prices for the flights you’re looking for. Airline websites, along with search engines to book flights, have access to the cookies on your computer. This basically means these companies can see your search history and what websites you’ve been visiting. This is why when you search online for a new bike you want to buy, suddenly your social media is filled with ads for bikes. Airline companies do the same thing. If you search for flights to Bermuda the airlines can use that data to increase the prices you see for their Bermuda flights. This is messed up, but it happens all of the time. So how do you stop airlines from jacking up ticket prices for the flights you’re looking for?

The best and easiest way is to use “incognito mode” on your internet browser, or using a browser with extensive cookie-blocker options like Firefox or Brave. By being “incognito” it means that none of your cookies are stored once you start a new session. This allows you to search for flights with a blank slate, and keeps airline company’s algorithms from raising the prices for the flights you need. Using a browser with extensive cookie-blocking options also allows you to do this as well. We cannot stress enough how important it is to search for all flights using “incognito mode,” so that companies cannot use your cookies to manipulate what you see and their prices.

That being said, you should always close an “incognito” window after doing a few searches and open a new one to make sure you start fresh with no cookies. Each time you reopen an “incognito” window your cookies are reset, making sure that none of your previous searches can be accessed by the booking sites or airlines. The more you search for the same flight route, the more likely the prices will start to rise. Booking sites do this to try and trick you into buying tickets for your flight before they go any higher, even though they are the ones purposefully raising the prices. So, if you are ready to start looking for cheap flights remember this hack: always search in “incognito mode.”

We have all heard that there is a best day of the week to buy plane tickets. Oftentimes people will say that buying airplane tickets is always cheapest on a Tuesday or Wednesday. However, the data does not support this. On any given week the cheapest day to buy tickets can change. It actually depends more on the day you leave that will determine the lowest price, with weekday flights often being cheaper than weekend flights. The best hack for identifying the cheapest day to fly is to use a website like Skyscanner where you can see the prices of flights for an entire month to determine which day is the cheapest to fly.

For example, if you know you want to travel a certain month, or week, you should do a little research first. Put your browser in incognito mode, and select a one-way flight to your destination. But instead of entering a date, select the “whole month” or “flexible dates” option to view the prices of flights across multiple days. This way you can choose the cheapest day to fly and save some money. After you have done your research, make sure you write down when you want to leave, close your browser, and reopen it in “incognito mode” to find the cheapest return flight using the same process. This hack will help you save a little extra cash if you plan ahead.

It should come as no surprise that nonstop flights are more expensive than ones with layovers. If you don’t mind grabbing a drink at an airport bar, or sitting for a couple hours reading a book while waiting for a flight, it may be worth your time looking into flights that have a layover before reaching your final destination. Obviously, you need to weigh your options. If you are flying relatively close to your departure point, the extra cash a layover might save you may not be worth it if you have to fly across the country and back again just to find a layover. But, data analysts have found that a long distance flight with one layover can save you around 5% on your tickets. If you really have some time to kill you can save about 7% on tickets if you allow for two layovers.

Not all hacks for cheap airfare will work for everyone, and that’s okay. That’s the reason we are giving you so many hacks to choose from. This next hack can literally get you a free flight. If you are a big traveler you are going to want to get a credit card that gives you the highest amount of travel points just for using it on day to day things. For example, the Chase Sapphire Preferred Card can pay for an entire flight if you spend $4000.00 in the first three months of having it. Basically, if you use the card to pay your rent or mortgage, and for groceries and gas, Chase will give you an automatic 80,000 points, which is equivalent to $1000.00 when purchasing a plane ticket. Then as you continue to use the card you accumulate more and more points. So, if you’re looking for a credit card and you want to travel, you can kill two birds with one stone by signing up for a card with travel rewards.

If you already have done all of the hacks above, our next one is a little less common, but can end up saving you huge amounts of money when buying plane tickets. Everyone makes mistakes, but when airlines make them with their prices it can benefit you greatly. The largest discounts, and therefore cheapest tickets, happen when there are currency conversion mistakes, technical glitches, or someone just makes a silly mistake on the airline’s end. This leads to what are known as “error fares” where flights are dirt cheap until the airline realizes the mistake and fixes it. Some of the best websites that compile these mistakes, or lets you know when they occur, is Scott’s Cheap Flights.

This site has a dedicated team that watches flight prices and scours the different airline’s websites for mistakes. They then email their subscribers when they find error fares, making sure to inform you before they are gone. There is both a free version of this service and a paid one. On average subscribers save around $550.00 per ticket, so it is worth looking into. Secret Flying and Skyscanner are both useful for finding error fares, and worth looking into as well. Error fares may be one of the hacks that can save you the most money when booking a flight.

If you need to book a flight for specific days, and have no wiggle room, there are a few hacks to make sure you get the lowest fares. This is especially true if it is a longer flight. When booking your flights sometimes there is no direct way to get to where you want to go. In this case you will want to check into booking your connecting flights yourself. If you book each individual leg of your journey separately, you can save some serious money. This is because you can mix and match different airlines that may have different price points. Also, the same airline may be charging you more for their layover than if you just booked the flights separately yourself.

A word of caution when doing this. Make sure you give yourself enough time between flights to make it to your next gate. If you book the flights separately on different airlines, they most likely will not be sympathetic if you arrive late on a competitor’s airplane and miss your flight. It is imperative you plan ahead and give yourself a long enough layover between flights to make sure you don’t miss your connecting flight. That being said, it may be even better — and sometimes cheaper — to stay a day or two at your connecting location. Maybe if you have some time you can explore the layover city before returning to the airport for the next leg of your journey. This hack could theoretically give you two vacations in one.

Sometimes you know you need to get away, but have no idea where you should go. This is not a bad thing. Actually, it could work in your favor for this next flight hack. If you just need to get away and want to see the cheapest possible tickets from an airport near you, kiwi.com has your back. All you need to do is go to their website and select your departure city and dates of flying. Then Kiwi does the rest by providing you with a list sorted by price of all the countries and destinations you can fly to cheaply. This makes it easy for you to identify the best place to go for the smallest amount of money. You may even end up someplace you never thought you’d be able to afford for dirt cheap. Or, maybe you find yourself falling in love with the destination of your cheap flight and never get on your return flight home. Whatever happens, at least you will know you spent the least amount of money on airfare possible.

Kayak.com made this next hack possible, and even gave it the name “hacker fare.” This may be the single easiest way to save big money on your flight. The premise itself is simple, but there are some intricacies that could save you extra cash. At the most basic level hacker fares are when you fly one airline to a destination, and a different airline back. Normally this works best when two competing airlines fly to and from the same destination. When you are flying to larger airports it’s almost always cheaper to book a flight one way with one airline, and the return flight with whatever competitor airline also flies to that airport. Sometimes it is cheaper to book two one way tickets on the same airline than round trip tickets, so it is always good to check your options. Plus you will have much more flexibility with departing times if you don’t confine yourself to a single airline with a round trip ticket.

When pursuing hacker fares it is vital that you book the two cheapest tickets you find one right after the other. So, the best way to do hacker fares outside of using Kayak.com is to use Google Flights or Skyscanner to search for the cheapest one way tickets to and from your destination in an incognito window. Once you have found the flights, close the incognito window and immediately go to the airline’s website with the flight number and book each one way flight one after the other. This can save you big on your plane tickets. A final flight hack which many of us take for granted is: if you find a cheap flight, you should book it immediately.

Airline price analysts have found that it is extremely rare that ticket prices get chapter as your departure date gets closer. More often than not what happens is the airline offers low rates as a baseline, and as seats fill, they begin to increase their prices. This means that the longer you wait, the higher the prices will creep. It is probably a safe bet that if you want to fly somewhere to get away, other people have the same idea. If you wait, those other people will snatch up the cheapest tickets, leaving you with the more expensive seats later on.

One of the biggest ways to save on airplane tickets is to book way in advance if you know when and where you’re going. If your dates are a little flexible, even better. But, unless you get extremely lucky, the longer you wait, the more the tickets will cost. It is a much safer bet to buy your tickets early using the hacks from this video than hoping and praying for a magical price drop that may never come.

One last hack for cheap flights is: use the flight hack websites already out there. They have been doing this for a long time, and most already know many of the tricks. Skyscanner and Hopper allow you to register for price-alert tracking, which will send you emails when the time to buy your tickets is right. It is also always a good idea to check other flight search engines such as Kayak or Google Flights to make sure you don’t miss any deals before booking.