6 Ways to Buy Air-ticket With $5
1. The best time to buy
- The 60-day rule: look for your flight no sooner (or later) than 1.5-2 months before the trip.
- Buy tickets on dates from mid-January until early March.
- Try to purchase your tickets on Tuesdays from 2 to 4 pm.
- Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons are the times of the lowest flight ticket prices.
- If you’re planning a weekend flight, it’s best to buy your tickets on a Friday night or during Saturday.
2. Airline system failures
No price
calculator is perfect, and sometimes they malfunction. This usually
happens with complex flights, but you can be lucky enough to have
an error with a simple one too.
It’s
not a law by any means — more of a chance. It’s almost
impossible to buy a ticket to the city you need with the help
of a system error, yet a spontaneous vacation is quite
another thing.
- airfarewatchdog.com has a "Top 50 Fares" section, updated daily.
- secretflying.com posts a selection of fresh errors daily. Better follow it on Facebook and Twitter to always stay updated.
- holidaypirates.com has an alert system for holiday and weekend deals as well as for a particular airport of departure.
3. The 24-hour rule
Check
the same flight the next morning after you’ve booked it as search
engines often set filters to default and may suggest cheaper options.
If the price is cheaper, you can cancel your booking and re-purchase
your ticket, paying a small fee or skipping it altogether
depending on the airline and booking platform. Yapta.com will
help you track prices for a particular flight and change tickets
if you need it.
4. The cheapest airlines
Otherwise
called low-cost carriers, and their policy is the best price you can get.
Ryanair,
one of the most popular economy airlines in Europe, is well
known (and well loved) for its crazy discounts. Recently it said that
its flights may become free before 2020.
How
to use all low-cost airlines’ features using Ryanair
as an example:
- Inspect the price chart of your airline. The cheapest tickets by Ryanair are 54 and 10 days before the flight.
- Avoid popular cities. If you want to get to Paris, don’t select its central airport. It’s better to opt for Champagne-Ardenne or Vatry, whose prices are much lower.
- Use other search engines too, rather than only the low-cost airline’s one as they track economy airlines and system errors. However, don’t forget to check the "direct" website flights — on rare occasions their fares might be lower.
5. A hidden city feature
This
one is well known to experienced travelers: they hide their
destination in the middle of the route. If you need to get
to Istanbul, don’t rush to book a direct flight. Sometimes,
a flight to Rome with a transfer at Istanbul may
be much cheaper.
6. Cheap ticket search engines
Their
job is simple: to analyze the prices among hundreds of airlines
for the route you need, as well as sort them by set parameters:
price, date, time of flight, number of stops, etc. Here
is the list of the most popular ones:
- skyscanner.net
- matrix.itasoftware.com
- kayak.com
- whichbudget.com
- expedia.com
- momondo.com
- jetradar.com
- cheapoair.com
- kiwi.com
- orbitz.com
- tripadvisor.com
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