Finding your perfect holiday home is just one step in the holiday-booking process. Finding flight is usually another, fairly annoying, step in the process. Here are a few tips that may just help you find the best possible flights for your holiday.
Find a Good Flight Search Engine (and know how to use it)
Rather than searching on individual airline sites, use a search engine to search for all flights, on all airlines for you. Skyscanner has to be the best for this. If you are set on your dates you can input these along with your departure and destination airport, but if your dates are flexible they also have a great tool that can search a whole month for you and show you what days are cheapest to fly on. This is great if you want to get the best rate possible, and it also shows you what days of the week are generally cheaper to fly on.
Don’t Wait to Book Your Flights
There is a misconception that flights go down as it gets closer to departure date. This is not true! If you know what dates you want to fly on, book them now. Often the biggest savings come from booking early. Once you have booked, keep an eye on the price of your flight, lots of airlines (although they don’t really like you to know this) will price match, even if its months after your booking and then offer you credit to book other flights with them in the future.
Go Incognito When You Search
If you have been searching for the same flights over a period of time and wonder why the price keeps creeping up each time you search again, this is not a coincidence. Sneaky websites track that you are interested in those dates and put the prices up slightly to panic you when you visit again and do the same search. This is to panic you into thinking they will continue to creep up. To avoid this, you can open a new browser, click on Ctrl, Shift and N together (if you are in Chrome or Safari browsers), or Ctrl, Shift and P (if you are in Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer.) Once you have done this you are in private browsing mode and none of your searches can be traced and used to inflate flight costs in the future. Very handy to know!
Check Out all the Airports Nearest to Your Holiday Destination
Sometimes the airport that is nearest to your holiday resort is not the one you can get the cheapest flights to. If you are prepared to drive a bit further when you land, you could save yourself money. Of course, these costs have to weighed up with fuel costs of driving further when you land. You also need to think about convenience (especially when travelling with children) and whether eating into your holiday time, by having a longer journey from the airport, is worth the savings. However, if you’re in no hurry and you don’t mind a bit of a longer drive, it can be worth your while. The same applies to your choice of departure airport, you may find that flying out from an alternative airport can cut costs.
