When you travel a lot, its important to shop around for the best deal on your airfare. By just spending a few hours here and there looking around and comparing, the savings can be enormous for one flight, let along the savings you will make over an entire year. This is especially true, if like me, you aren’t particularly fussy about which airlines you fly with (just resist the temptation to look up their negative reviews and less than favourable safety records).
For impromptu getaways I find that by far the best comparison site to use is skyscanner.com. They have an awesome feature that allows you to select your dates and starting airport then compare flights to every destination in order of price. This has been an invaluable tool and one that we use pretty much every time we want to get away and don’t mind where. It also leads to us visiting some amazing destinations that we otherwise would not have thought about.
A few months ago it was coming up to a long weekend and we decided we wanted to go away, but we still hadn’t booked anything with just over a week to go. We hadn’t really planned on going far, maybe a trip to Austin or up to Montreal. When we got round to doing a search with Skyscanner it turned out the cheapest destination to fly to from New York that weekend was Copenhagen. So off we went to Denmark, all for way cheaper that we could get any domestic flights in the US.
Keep in mind, the day you purchase airline tickets is also very important.
A recent study found that Sunday not Tuesday is the least expensive day to purchase airfare. Saturday is the second best day for cheaper prices. Tuesday is still cheap, the cheapest of the weekdays to buy airfare. How much money are we talking on average? $71 cheaper than what you would pay on a Monday. Monday, by the way, is the most expensive day to purchase an airline ticket.
