How To Get A Great Airfare To Visit Us
Are you interested in visiting us in one of our destinations or just curious about finding great airfare deals? Here’s a quick primer…
Scott's Cheap Flights
First, I use a service called Scott's Cheap Flights to watch for great deals. This service is really targeted at those who are flexible in their dates and destinations. You specify the airport(s) you'll depart from and then you get an email whenever there’s an unusually low fare to an international destination. The time frames for those deals vary, but often there’s a window of several months for your departure date. However, you can’t specify the destination or the date range.
There’s a free option where you don’t get all the notifications, but the paid service is cheap and will be worth it if you only take one flight.
Google Flights
If you already know where and when you want to go, you can monitor specific destinations on specific dates using Google Flights. The fares it shows are the final price, including taxes and fees and all passengers (its not the per person rate, so you see the actual amount you will pay).
After you enter your departure and destination airports (yes, you can specify multiple airports for each and it will find the best flight combinations) be sure to specify your bags as one of the options. Google will incorporate the cost of the bags into the price it shows, to minimize surprise fees when you go to purchase.
Another great feature, if you have a little bit of flexibility, is that you can see the cheapest fares for a whole month at a glance. When you specify your departure date, the drop-down calendar will update after a few seconds with the fares for departures on each displayed date. After you choose your departure dates, the calendar updates with the fares for each return date.
Note that when specifying your departure date, the fare shown assumes a trip duration based on whatever return you’ve already specified. So if your return date is set to seven days away, all of the fares shown are for seven day trips.
After you’ve specified dates, airports, and bags you’ll see flight options. Scroll down past the first three or four flight options and you’ll see a button to monitor that specific flight search. Turn on the toggle by clicking it. Then, anytime the fare goes up or down by a significant amount, Google will email your Gmail account.
Act Fast
Regardless of how you find your great deal, you have to be able to act fast. When airlines have these big drops in fares, they usually have limited inventory availability at those prices and the sales often only last for 24 hours or less. I’ve successfully booked flights 48 hours after a sale starts but I've also had multiple incidents where I delayed just an hour or two and found that the deal was already sold out.