We’re pretty sure we won’t surprise you if we say you’ll save a lot of money if you keep flying the same airline and saving airpoints, or miles, or whatever it is this company offers you. But did you know there are some really awesome tricks that will help you save money on your next flight?
Technical tricks to book the cheapest flights
It’s no secret that airplane websites and special aggregators show higher prices to people potentially ready to pay more. If you live in a wealthy country (and if you’re reading focus magazine, you surely do! But it also means USA, UK and pretty much any European country) or if you’re searching for flights on MacBook or iPhone – be ready to pay a few extra bucks.
The solution? Buy airplane tickets using PC and Windows BUT FIRST, don’t forget to switch on the ‘Incognito’ mode in your browser which makes it impossible for the websites to pick up your current location. If you’re using Google Chrome, you’ll find ‘New incognito window’ button in a drop-down menu in the upper right corner. Firefox calls it ‘New private window’, just like Safari, only in the later one it’s located under the ‘File’ button. Internet Explorer users – first of all, for goodness sake stop using this slow and weird browser and you’ll find your life will improve significantly! And secondly, your incognito mode is hidden in the upper right corner menu as well – click on ‘Safety’ first and then choose ‘InPrivate Browsing’ (see, even this action took you longer than anybody else!).
Sorry, we just HAD to post this!
Always be a ‘cold’ customer
Did you ever notice how sometimes Facebook or Google ads show you extremely cheap airplane tickets but once you start browsing and comparing the options, the price goes higher and higher, and by the time you finally push ‘Buy tickets’ on that very first link, the cheap tickets are no longer available and you’re forced to buy at a higher price? The thing is, when ads ‘catch’ you in an unexpected place, while you aren’t even looking for tickets, you’re a ‘cold’ customer who is unlikely to buy a ticket, so there is no risk for the company to show the lowest price they have. But once you’ve shown your interest in this particular destination, you’re a ‘warm’ customer and will potentially pay more to get there.
Don’t fall into this trap and always be a ‘cold’ customer. Save the link to a place where you first saw that enticing and, after looking around and confirming there are no better options, go back to it and click on it in ‘Incognito mode’ or open it on a different computer with a different IP address so that you remain a first-time customer (coming in to work five minutes earlier might really be worth it!).
Hunt for error fares
Error fares are a dream come true for every avid traveller! We’re all humans and we all make mistakes. And even the biggest and most automated companies are operated by humans who may make a typo here and there. As a result, you buy a return ticket to the Maldives for $150 instead of $1,500, for example. Make sure you’re subscribed to discount alerts and newsletters of all the companies or websites you use to buy tickets – these mistakes happen quite often but, unfortunately, never last long as the companies are very fast at fixing anything that might lose them money.
This way of saving money on airplane tickets can be a bit risky though as some companies might cancel your booking and refund the money, so we don’t recommend making any plans or booking hotels for the next week or two. If you haven’t heard from the company, your extremely cheap flight is happening, congratulations!
Book inconvenient flights
Early morning or overnight – you can surely handle a bit of inconvenience in favour of saving money, right? Try to avoid ‘business hours’ especially if you’re flying from or to a big city.
The same goes for the airport. It’s not always beneficial to fly from point A directly to point B. Sometimes flying to a neighbourhood town and catching a bus or a taxi will cost less and, on longer distances, will even require less time on the road! For example, instead of flying from Sydney to London, you might fly to Paris and catch a $50 train to London from there. Or, when travelling within New Zealand, don’t just check Tauranga airport but compare it with the price of flying from and to Rotorua airport as well (here are a few cool things to do in Rotorua, if you decide to hang out there for a while). Sometimes you can save half price on that!
Designed by jeshoots / Freepik
Fly to the ‘wrong’ city
Every airline has a hub airport (bigger airlines might even have a few) that they use to concentrate passenger traffic and flight operations. For example, Qatar Airways is obviously based in Doha; Turkish Airlines in Stambul; and Delta international hubs are based in Paris, Amsterdam and Tokyo. Surprisingly, flying TO these particular hubs might cost you more than flying somewhere else, THROUGH them. So sometimes booking that extra connecting flight, and just jumping off in the airport you need, helps save money on flights! For example, let’s say you’re travelling in Asia and want to fly from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur. What if you book flights from Bangkok to Sri Lanka with a layover in Kuala Lumpur instead? We must admit, finding the cheaper option, in this case, might take quite a while and still, you might end up not finding one. But if you’re lucky, you might end up flying for $150 one way instead of $600.
But be careful, this option is only possible when you don’t have any luggage as your bags travel directly to the final destination and you won’t be able to pick them up halfway.
Book and fly at the right time
When is the best time to book tickets? When is the best time to fly? These are the questions you should be asking yourself when looking for the cheapest airplane tickets online.
First of all, statistics say that Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday flights tend to be cheaper than other days of the week.
Secondly, most often you’ll find the fares are cheaper 45 days before a flight within the country and 60 days before an international flight. The thing is, computer programmes calculate the optimal airfares based on information of the passenger traffic they have. No one wants their airplanes to fly empty and no one wants to book them out twice over, at a cheaper price. So the price of the tickets will depend on how many tickets have already been booked on this flight. Before the time frame, mentioned in the previous sentence, computers don’t yet have enough of the actual data, so they base their calculations on the previous year’s demand. Imagine how many things might have changed in a year! For example, everyone spent vacations in Bali last year, then a volcano erupted and way fewer people want to travel there this year. But the computer doesn’t know that yet, so when you’re booking your flight well in advance, it still predicts a high demand and shows you a high price. 45 days and 60 days is approximately when they update the data and start basing their calculations on the current situation.
Finally, there is this one last trick, that has never actually been confirmed by any airline but many travellers absolutely swear by it. They say, that you have the highest chances of booking the cheapest flights at 1 am on Wednesday. But it should be 1.00am on Wednesday in a timezone of the airline you’re planning to fly with (stick with New Zealand timezone for Air New Zealand, switch to Qatar for Qatar Airways, etc.). Why is this the case? Because most airlines run their special offers and promotions on Sunday and Monday and passengers usually have another 24 hours to pay for the tickets they’ve booked. 1.00am on Wednesday is when booked, but not purchased tickets, start coming back into the system and the computer realises there are still some empty spots it needs to sell. So, if you’ve missed out on the discount itself, make sure you’re the first one to grab those newly released tickets!
