Plane tickets are often a substantial part of any holiday or trip. They can cost many times the price of your accommodation. While many people expected the COVID pandemic to encourage companies to lower the price of air travel, it has actually led to fewer flights and higher costs as airlines try to recoup some of the money they lost through travel restrictions.
Saving money on flights can lighten the load when it comes to your budget, but you need to be clever and try a few different hacks in order to find the best prices.
Try and be flexible
Today’s airlines are very sophisticated with their pricing. They use complex algorithms which use data around demand, events, prices, weather, and many other factors to determine the price of a ticket.
Traveling to popular destinations at peak times is going to be the most expensive. So if you can be flexible with your travel dates and preferred flight times, then you could take advantage of better pricing.
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Don’t fly direct
In an ideal world, flights would be at a convenient time and fly direct to your destination. But these are the flights with the higher price tag. To reduce costs, try looking for indirect flights which might mean a change over or two on the way to your destination.
Try searching for direct flights from other airports and then buying a ticket from your home airport.
Use Airmiles and points
There are many store cards and other products that let you stack up Airmiles which you can then use to offset the cost of your tickets. It’s a good idea to try and save up these miles throughout the year, taking advantage of special offers.
Sign-up to mailing lists
Be the first to know about special offers and member discounts by signing up to the various different mailing lists of airlines. Email marketing is a huge part of their overall strategy, so they make sure that it’s in the best interests of their subscribers to get benefits from signing up. This could be through early access to sales or special deals.
If you don’t want your email inbox filled with spam, then you can create a different email for all of your airline newsletters or use a special filter in your email so that they are clogging up your inbox. Review them periodically to find any good deals, or look at the latest ones when you’re ready to book a trip.
Look for separate tickets
If you’re traveling with family or friends, you’ll most likely book the tickets in a group. But this often is a more expensive way of doing it. Look at the prices for individual tickets instead, and you will find that there can be a considerable price difference.