It will also vary a bit by the specific destination, especially around popular festivals. Fares to Dublin for St. Patrick’s Day or to China for Chinese New Year aren’t cheap.
There's so much bad info out there about the best time to book a flight, with many people claiming it's Tuesdays at 1pm, or early on Sunday mornings. If I achieve one thing in my brief stint on Earth, it will be to convince travelers to stop believing this nonsense. It’s not true, it won’t help you get cheap flights, and if anything will likely result in you overpaying for your next trip.
The better strategy for snagging discounts on flights is to book within what I call the Goldilocks Windows.
Airfare doesn’t change weekly these days. It changes daily, hourly, sometimes even minute-ly. Neither I nor anyone else can tell you with certainty when (or where) next week’s cheapest fares will pop up.
These days, airfare is set by complex algorithms that account for hundreds of ever-shifting factors, from consumer demand to oil prices to competitor’s prices and beyond. One factor airlines no longer rely on: technological constraints that only allowed them to change fares once a week at a set time.
Though there’s no set time or date that’s always cheapest to book, there’s still a period when cheap fares are most likely to pop up. I call these Goldilocks Windows.
For domestic flights, the best time to book is normally 1 to 3 months before your travel dates. For international trips, it’s 2 to 8 months prior. If your trip is during a peak travel period (Christmas, summer, St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin) add a couple months to those windows. If you’re traveling during low season it’s more likely cheap fares will pop up closer to departure date, but prices tend to jump in the last month or two before departure, so you don’t want to cut it too close.
You also want to pay attention to times when you know airfare is actually going to go up. At that is at the 21-, 14-, and 7-day marks before departure. Most fares include an advance purchase requirement, which mandates that a particular fare bucket is only available if booked, say, 21 (or 14 or 7) days or more in advance of travel.
Airlines know leisure travelers tend to book flights early and business travelers tend to book flights late. Airlines want to make sure they milk as much money as possible from business travelers who don’t care what the flight costs (it’s their company paying, after all), so they increase fares on the type of tickets business travelers buy, including last-minute bookings.
If you’re hoping for legitimately cheap, not just cheaper, flights, planning further in advance is the way to go. But if you've got to book last minute, just make sure you're doing so before the 21 mark.
>> Read our guides on finding cheap flights for Christmas, New Year's travel, or Spring Break or read about the best time to book a cheap flight
If you know exactly where and when you want to travel, use a site like Kayak or Google Flights to set an airfare alert and get notified if the fare drops below the current price. This works best if you have a specific location and dates, but some deals can still slip through the cracks. For example, if you set up a fare alert for Seattle to Paris, you could miss out on an amazing deal to London (which is only a short train ride away).
If you’re looking for cheap flights in the United States, be sure to search Southwest.com separately since Southwest flights don’t show up on any flight search engines. The Southwest Low Fare Calendar shows you the cheapest days for your route.
You can also find some cheap hidden fares on Skiplagged, but be sure to read up on the basics of hidden city ticketing so you know what you’ll be doing.
Budget airlines get a bad rap and some cases, it's warranted (we're looking at you, Spirit). But not all budget airlines are created equal. Several new ones, like Avelo, Breeze, and PLAY meet our standards for airlines.
Plus, budget airlines can be the best and most economical way for connecting your long-haul flight to your final destination. You may not want to fly a budget airline across the ocean, but when a flight from one end of Europe to the other costs $50, a budget airline flight gets a lot more appealing.
On foreign airlines, it can sometimes be cheaper if you book using the foreign version of their website and use a foreign currency. It's not full-proof. Sometimes there are no savings and sometimes the savings are so small as to not be worth the effort, but in other cases you can save a hundred dollars or more, so it's often worth checking. Just make sure you book with a credit card that has no foreign transaction fees.
You found a great fare. How long will it last? It's hard to say for sure! Unless it’s an advertised sale (which usually aren’t that great to begin with), there’s no public end-date on any given fare. The rule of thumb is that the better the fare, the shorter it will last.
In general you shouldn't expect most great fares to last longer than a few days. If it's a Mistake Fare, it could be gone in a few hours, or even minutes.
Cheap FlightsOkay, but how can I act fast enough to snag a great fare if you've got, you know, responsibilities and stuff? Well, there's a handy regulation called the 24-hour rule that says for flights to or from the US, airlines must allow you to cancel free within 24 hours.
So, if you aren't sure you can get time off work, for example, rather than wait to hear from your boss, you could go ahead and book the amazing deal you found before it disappears. If your boss comes back and says you can't go, as long as it's within the 24 hours, you can get a full refund.
You can also use this trick if you book a flight and the price goes down within 24 hours. Just make sure you book the new flight before you cancel the old one.
Airline schedules sometimes change. And when they do, that presents an opportunity. Under federal law, if an airline cancels or significantly changes your flight itinerary, you’re eligible for a full cash refund. Rather than give you a refund, airlines would rather just move you to a different flight, which makes schedule changes a valuable opportunity to improve your flight.
Say you originally bought a 6am nonstop flight because it was cheapest. If the airline decided to make that a one-stop flight, you could switch to a more convenient time—without having to pay more. If you had a connecting flight and the airline changes the time, you could see about switching to a nonstop. And if it’s a trip you no longer want to take, schedule changes let you get a full cash refund.
Yes, it's a shameless plug, but helping people book cheap flights and travel more is what we're all about. We send our members alerts for cheap tickets like $202 roundtrip to Japan, $164 to Hawaii, and $23 to Puerto Rico—all on direct or one-stop flights on airlines you know. You can even join for free to try us out.
Both Google Flights and Kayak let you track a specific trip and get alerted when the price drops
Both Google Flights and Kayak let you track a specific trip and get alerted when the price drops
I found a cheap flight that departs from City A, connects through City B, and arrives in City C. If I live in City B, can I just skip the A-B leg?
No. Once you miss a leg of an itinerary, you're considered a no-show and the rest of your itinerary automatically gets cancelled out. The only way skipping a leg can work is (a) if you buy two separate one-way tickets rather than a roundtrip, or (b) if you just skip the very last leg of a roundtrip itinerary, in this case from City B to City C. This is a practice called “hidden city ticketing,” which the airlines don’t like (so don’t advertise your plans!) but has a seal of approval from the New York Times Ethicist.
No. It doesn’t make a shred of difference. Many people incorrectly assume that the airlines are manipulating prices based on past flight searches. The thinking goes that if the airlines see that a user is interested in a certain flight or route, they’ll raise the prices. But if this was true, the Flight Experts at Going would have a much harder time finding deals. We run thousands of searches every day, day after day. If prices were rising based on those previous searches, we’d see it. Airline and OTA (aka online travel agency) websites do typically access your IP address, but they do that in order to provide accurate location-related information like language and currency—not to manipulate prices based on your activity. Airline prices are highly volatile. If the price happens to change between searches, there could be a number of factors at play. First, prices fluctuate all the time, and it’s possible that the price simply increased in the few minutes between searches. Second, a price is usually only good for a certain number of seats. Once those seats are sold, the price rises to the next bracket. If you’re searching on an OTA, it’s also possible that the first price you saw had already expired but the OTA hadn’t yet updated its prices. When you ran the second search, the prices had updated and the new price was higher. In the wise words of Alexis Rose, “People aren't thinking about you the way you’re thinking about you.” While airline and OTA sites are tracking things like your location, they aren’t obsessively tracking your searches to sneakily increase the prices on flights they know you’re interested in. When a price increases the second time you search, it’s coincidence caused by a number of factors, or simply a lagging price update. It’s not an intentional move to get more money from you. While there’s no harm in clearing your cookies or searching for a flight in your browser’s incognito mode, it’s just a waste of time. It’s not going to help you get a better price.
Basically, no. Last-minute deals can pop up, but it’s increasingly rare. In the last week or so before a flight, the price tends to skyrocket. This wasn’t true 20 years ago as airlines slashed prices to fill unsold seats, but nowadays airlines jack up prices on unsold seats knowing that business travelers are far more flexible on price but can’t make plans until the last minute.
For most carriers, one-way flights are significantly more than half the cost of a roundtrip flight. If you want to fly into a different airport than you will depart from, it's usually better to book an open-jaw flight (flying A to B, then C to A) on one itinerary rather than two separate one-ways. Airlines whose one-way flights are around half of a roundtrip include jetBlue, Norwegian, Condor, and basically all intra-continental budget carriers like Ryanair and Air Asia.
It’s pretty rare to find cheap last-minute flights because airlines typically jack up the price to gouge business travelers who are last-minute planners and not very price-sensitive. Cheap last-minute flights are more likely on international routes than domestic routes because business travelers don’t fly international routes nearly as much. In general, using the tips above is the best strategy for finding cheap last-minute flights, but if you absolutely have to fly last minute and want to do so for as little as possible, check out our guide to finding cheap last minute flights for a few additional tips.
If your plans are set in stone and you're not too picky about your seat, a basic economy ticket may be a great way to save money. However, if you prefer the flexibility of changeable (and upgrade-able) ticket and want to select your seat at booking, it may make sense for you to upgrade to main economy. Google Flights and other search sites make it easy to see what you're getting—and any extra fees—and switch classes depending on what's best for you. You can read more about basic economy in our Ultimate Guide to Basic Economy or check out our tips for making a basic economy flight a little more pleasant.
Budget airlines have proliferated in recent years, giving passengers more choice when it comes to cheap flights. Of course, not all budget airlines are equal. Our favorites, like AirAsia X and LEVEL, offer comfortable seats, reliable service, and reasonable fees.
This is it. This is what you've been waiting for: The ultimate guide that covers everything you need to know for how to find cheap flights.