Key Takeaways
- Booking a flight can be one of the most stressful parts of travel. Airfare is expensive and, with an ever-changing variation in prices, we often worry
- “Maybe if I wait just a little longer, it’ll be cheaper,” we say to ourselves.
- I used to be that person. I’d spend hours upon hours searching for the right price on multiple websites, second-guessing myself, and worrying about wh
Booking a flight can be one of the most stressful parts of travel. Airfare is expensive and, with an ever-changing variation in prices, we often worry that if we buy right now, prices could drop and we’d be the person who paid the most money for the flight.
“Maybe if I wait just a little longer, it’ll be cheaper,” we say to ourselves.
I used to be that person. I’d spend hours upon hours searching for the right price on multiple websites, second-guessing myself, and worrying about what happens when the prices drop. I would hold off on buying, waiting for that perfect moment. It was like trying to time the market — and it simply doesn’t work. 99 times out of 100, you lose.
Because you can’t predict prices. The best day to book is usually today.
A while back, I went to visit the folks at Google Flights. Over lunch, they told me about a study they did on thousands of flights. They found that the average drop price is about $50 USD. That means if you wait, you could save about $50 USD. Just as likely (if not more so) is getting stuck with a price that is hundreds higher. (This excludes sales and mistake fares.)
As someone who doesn’t go a day without searching for airfare to regions all over the world, I can tell you that you can’t second-guess yourself. If you’re comfortable with the price you paid, you need to accept it and move on — even if airfare drops.
Today, Route for Less wants to show you how to put that into practice and walk you through how we book our tickets.
Step 1: Search for Deals
First, we’ll look at deal websites like Going, Holiday Pirates, or The Flight Deal to see if there are any fare sales going on. Sometimes there are, most of the time there aren’t. (You can read our review of Going on routeforless.com to see how they work.)
If we find an awesome deal, great! The search is over and we can go on with our day. If not, we continue to the next step.
Step 2: Search Main Routes
Next, we start with the ITA Matrix, an amazing tool that allows for complex searching and that every flight junkie we know uses. While it only searches major airlines (no budget carriers here), it has a calendar option so you can see prices over the course of the month, providing you with a solid baseline on prices.
Being flexible with your dates is key to booking cheap airfare, so getting an overview of an entire month is important. In fact, being flexible with your destination can yield even cheaper fares. If you aren’t set on somewhere in particular, use the “everywhere” option in flight search engines like Skyscanner or Google Flights and see what you can find.
But for the purposes of this article, we’re going to use concrete destinations. Let’s look at an example route from New York to Barcelona:
You can see at a glance that the cheapest flight for this route is $404 USD. But click through to choose your dates and booking options, and you’ll get the full picture:
As you can see, the cheapest round-trip flight is indeed $404 USD. It’s a TAP Portugal flight from Newark with a layover in Lisbon. But, for just $457 USD round-trip, you can fly direct with United, a much better flight overall (see the flight circled in red in the screenshot above).
Next, we go to Skyscanner to compare prices and see if there are any budget carriers flying the route we need.
New York to Barcelona on Skyscanner:
As you can see, Skyscanner brought up the similar results, with a slightly cheaper option for the TAP Air flight. While the price differential isn’t huge, you can see that Skyscanner brings up different flights and results (ITA Matrix didn’t find the Lufthansa direct flight), making it worth checking.
