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How to find cheap international flights
| Summary: Transatlantic airfare can vary drastically even amongst people on the same airplane. After years of flying between Boston and Italy, I've developed the following strategies to lessen the load of international airfare on my wallet: 1) travel in the off-season; 2) don't limit your ticket search to orbitz, travelocity, and expedia; 3) if you might change flight dates or cancel your ticket, don't buy the ticket from companies like orbitz, expedia, and travelocity; and 4) fly to your main destination from within Europe. |
Article created: May 19, 2007
Article by: Jeremiah Faith
My girlfriend's from Italy, and we live in Boston on very small graduate student salaries. Because of these two factors, we spend 10-20% of our annual income on flights to Italy from Boston. After doing this for a few years now, we've come up with a few basic strategies for getting to Italy as cheaply as possible. These tips pretty much apply to all international travel from the US to Europe. I've not flown to other international destinations, so I don't know if they apply to other areas of the world. Here are the strategies we use:
1. Travel in the off-season Ok everyone knows this strategy. It applies to domestic flights too. However, I think it is even more important for international flights. We can get tickets to Italy from Boston for as low as $500 in January - March. In June, we pay at least double that amount. Being from cold Boston, I actually like visiting southern Europe better in the winter than in the summer. I can get a break from the Boston cold, and the European museums and tourist areas are much less crowded in the winter. I find it preferable to shiver 15 minutes waiting to get into the Vatican in February than to sweat for 2 hours waiting to get into the Vatican in June.
2. Don't limit your search to orbitz, travelocity, expedia, etc... For international flights, the big airline ticket search engines like orbitz don't provide an easy or reliable way to search for flights around the days you're interested in. If you're flexible with your dates, you can often save a few hundred dollars, but the only way to figure this out on orbitz is to brute-force try all of the combinations of dates.
More and more, the airlines themselves are providing really good ticket searches. If you search on the British Airways or Lufthansa websites, they'll provide you with the prices for several days before and after the days of your search. These price tables they provide can really help you narrow down which days are going to be the cheapest to fly. Often times, the cheapest days are similar for other airlines, so you can always go back to orbitz and search the cheap days for all airlines simultaneously once you find them out.
3. If you might change flight dates or cancel your ticket, don't buy the ticket from orbitz, expedia, etc... When you buy your ticket from one of the primary flight search engines like orbitz, it can be difficult to figure out the cancellation and ticket change policies for the airline you're buying the ticket from. You can often buy the ticket from the airline company's website for the same price as it is on orbitz. If not, at least go to the airline's website and check out their policies. These policies can vary quite a bit from company to company, so you might be better off buying a more expensive ticket with a more flexible exchange policy if you think you'll need to change it.
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