It’s safe to say I look daily at flight tickets and deals. I think I have an obsession honestly as I’m always looking for the next destination before we leave for the one already booked!

How to Find Flights

I wanted to share with you a few tips that we find helpful when it comes to snagging the best tickets for your vacation.

Flexibility

Be flexible with dates of travel. Try out different departure and arrival dates. We often find weekdays are cheaper. Try to avoid holiday seasons, and all the school breaks. Basically when everyone else is traveling. This drives up the price significantly. The spring and fall are our favorite times to travel because of this.

Check Different Airports

Look up prices for different airports in the area. Although this isn’t ideal for most, numerous times we have flown out of one of the Washington DC airports verses the Raleigh Durham airport in North Carolina. Our first Europe trip we saved $800 together by flying from Washington Dulles airport. I don’t know about you but the 4-5 hour drive vs. the 1.5 hour drive was totally worth it for us!

Budget Airlines

Budget airlines may not always include free food or you may have to pay extra for baggage, but if you learn to travel light and pack some food with you, then it’s no problem! Our favorite budget airlines are WOW Air and Ryanair which are based in Iceland and the UK. Once we got a flight from Frankfurt to London for $10 with Ryanair! If you are looking for some fantastic trips to Iceland, WOW Air have multiple deals from Baltimore airport straight to the capital Reykjavik!

Search Engines

Here are 3 sites we always start with

  1. Skyscanner – I love the feature on Skyscanner where you can put in the departure airport as “Everywhere”. It gives you the cheapest places to go in order! This is great for us when we have a hard time deciding where to go next!
  2. Google Flights – This doesn’t have the “everywhere” feature like Skyscanner but alternatively you can type in a region such as “Eastern Europe” or “Caribbean Islands” and it sorts out the cheapest destination in the area!
  3. Momondo – The search feature is similar to the above mentioned Google Flights.

We AT LEAST look at at all 3 of the above before booking. We tend to check Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity and CheapOair just to cover our bases as well. I like the rewards program with Orbitz where you accrue Orbitz bucks to apply at bookings.

I hope these simple tips will help when it comes to booking flights. Contact us and let us know some of your tricks or favorite search engines! We are always looking for the next deal.