How to Find Cheap Flights: 15 Proven and Lesser-Known Tips

Travelling isn’t expensive — but flights usually are. They’re often the single biggest cost of the whole trip. We’ll teach you how to hunt down cheap flights and save as much money as possible.

If you’re not patient, travelling can end up costing you a fortune. It’s not unusual for the first fare you come across to be ten times more expensive than the cheapest possible option on the very same route.

So how do you find the cheapest flights and often save hundreds of pounds?

After five years of travelling together we’ve learned a thing or two, and we’re happy to share the tips that will help you save money when booking your tickets.

The best flight search engines

Using flight search engines is the most convenient way to stumble upon cheap flights. These sites scan the offers of dozens of airlines and compare them side by side.

Start your search with the comparison tools and always try several of them. You never know which one will show the best price.

We always start with Kiwi and Skyscanner to get a sense of the price. Then we check the other search engines too, and finally we look at the website of the airline we found through the search.

The flight search engines we use

• Kiwi

A search engine (formerly Skypicker) that specialises in low-cost flights and can combine even complicated connections. It offers a brilliant map where you can roughly sketch out where you’d like to fly from and to. Its newer Nomad feature lets you plan multi-week trips with several stops.

• Skyscanner

Skyscanner is the most widely used search engine and is especially popular in the UK and the US. It has an incredibly broad database of flights, which is why — alongside Kiwi — it’s always one of the first places we look for tickets. Searching Skyscanner UK for cheap flights is a great starting point.

• AZair

AZair may look like it’s stuck in the last decade, but for anyone with a little patience it’s the ultimate tool. It offers a huge range of configurations, and the “I don’t care where I fly” feature is simply genius.

• Momondo
• Google Flights
• Kayak

Sign up for cheap flight alerts

As well as scanning the search engines, make use of their email alerts. If you have a rough idea of when and where you want to fly, the system lets you receive an email whenever the price changes.

Useful flight deal sites

There are also plenty of companies out there that hunt down the cheapest flights online and let you know about them, hoping you’ll book through them and they’ll earn a commission.

Take advantage of this and sign up to as many as you can. Some of the best ones to follow include:

• Skyscanner
• Kayak
• Jack’s Flight Club
• Google Flights

International cheap flight sites

• Dollar Flight Club
• Going (formerly Scott’s Cheap Flights)
• SecretFlying.com
• Holidaypirates.com
• TheFlightDeal.com

Choose your destination based on price

The more flexible you are, the better your chances of landing a really cheap flight.

For finding the best price with flexible dates and destinations, we recommend these tools:

• Kiwi search
• Google Explore
• Skyscanner Inspire Map

If you’re not set on flying to one specific place, you’ve got wonderful freedom. The search engines will help you find cheap flights all over the world, and you might just end up in some remote corner you’d never even planned to visit.

A bit of flexibility and spontaneity can save you a whole lot of money.

Sign up to airline newsletters

The best sales are announced by the airlines themselves, and they usually let their subscribers know first.

Signing up to their newsletters gives you access to these “secret” offers. It’s not unusual to get an email with a 50% discount on a particular route.

There are loads of these newsletters, though. We recommend setting up an email filter and saving them to a separate folder, or even creating a dedicated email address just for them.

Which newsletters should you sign up to? It naturally depends on where you’re flying to and from, but this list covers most of Europe and the UK well:

Major airlines flying from the UK

British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, American Airlines, Air Canada, Air France, Finnair, Delta Air Lines, Eurowings, Iberia, KLM, Lufthansa, United Airlines, Turkish Airlines, Qatar Airways, Emirates, Scandinavian Airlines, Austrian Airlines, Swiss International Air Lines, flydubai, Transavia Airlines.

Low-cost carriers flying within Europe (besides the above)

Ryanair, easyJet, Jet2.com, Wizz Air, Norwegian, Icelandair, Widerøe, Vueling, Pegasus Airlines, Eurowings, Condor, AirBaltic and Aer Lingus.

Other airlines flying within Europe (besides the above)

Aeromexico, Avianca, Condor Flugdienst, Wamos Air, Air China.

When is the right time to book flights

The best time to book flights is usually between 4 and 11 weeks before your planned departure. The cheapest days to fly out are Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday, as they fall outside peak times and tickets are cheaper.

Mondays and Sundays, on the other hand, are the most expensive days to depart.

Early departures and long layovers usually save you money

If you don’t mind getting up early and spending a few hours at the airport, you can make your tickets even cheaper. Connections with a layover longer than six hours tend to be cheaper than those with a comfortable, quick transfer.

Don’t fly in peak season

We never fly anywhere other than out of season any more. Not only are the tickets far cheaper (easily by 60%), but the weather is usually milder and there are far fewer tourists too.

Book flights in January

Because demand for flights always cools off in January, it’s a great time to buy.

You can usually pick up long-haul flights for around £250 without even trying hard. Whether you’re planning to fly in spring or summer, January is the best month to book.

Avoid school holidays and bank holidays

If you can possibly avoid them, never fly during holidays and bank holidays. Ticket prices are often as much as 100% higher! So cross these off your list automatically:

• Summer school holidays
• Christmas, New Year and Easter
• Public holidays in your destination
• Long weekends and bank holidays both at home and in your destination

Book early in the morning or late at night

While we’ve got no hard test to back this up, some flight hunters swear that prices dip slightly when fewer people are sitting at their computers. Why not give it a try?

Don’t be afraid to fly from other airports

Flying from your nearest big airport is convenient, but you often end up paying far too much. Always at least check the surrounding airports to see whether a flight is cheaper from there. From the UK you’ll often fly cheaper from:

• London Stansted, Luton or Gatwick (instead of Heathrow)
• Manchester
• Birmingham
• Bristol
• Edinburgh or Glasgow

You’ll see that the differences can run to dozens of pounds — sometimes much more. In that case it’s definitely worth spending a few extra hours on a train or coach to reach a cheaper airport.

Fly with low-cost carriers

When searching for flights, always check whichairline to find out which airlines fly to your destination. There’s a good chance you’ll find several low-cost carriers flying for a fraction of the price of a regular ticket — think cheap flights with Ryanair or easyJet.

For these airlines, look up the connection directly on their own websites. They sometimes block the search engines from showing their flights.

Thanks to low-cost airlines you can get to the other side of the world and back for a few hundred pounds — but it comes with a few catches. These carriers charge fees for just about everything, from checked bags and onboard food to printing your boarding pass.

Their tickets are also usually non-refundable and non-changeable, and they often fly from smaller, out-of-town airports. So before you book that cheap flight, read the rules carefully and weigh up whether it’s worth it. You’ll find a full list of low-cost airlines on Wikipedia.

Book long flights in separate legs

For flights with a layover, it sometimes pays to book each leg of the journey separately. You can save anywhere from 5% to 20% on the price. You do need to time the flights carefully so you have enough buffer for the transfer even if there’s a delay. Miss your connection and things get complicated fast.

Always check, too, whether it’s cheaper to book two one-way tickets. We’ve had it happen more than once that two singles came out cheaper than a single return.

Use an incognito window and a VPN

Has it ever happened to you that you searched for a flight, and a few hours later the very same search showed a more expensive fare?

This can happen because some companies (including the search engines) use cookies in your browser to artificially bump up the price. An incognito window or clearing your cookies solves the problem.

When booking domestic flights, it’s always worth using a VPN to make it look like you’re actually in that country. For example, a flight from one Mexican city to another will be noticeably cheaper if you book it “from Mexico” rather than “from the UK”.

How to prove an onward flight

Planning a long-term stay abroad and not sure when you’ll want to come back? Then study the country’s entry requirements carefully.

As a measure against illegal immigration, countries often require so-called “Proof of Onward Travel” — basically a ticket leaving the country. You don’t necessarily have to fly back to where you came from, but you do need to prove you intend to leave. This is a particular headache for us long-term travellers. Often we don’t even know the month we’ll want to fly out, let alone where to!

Luckily there’s a service that solves the problem for us. For a few euros, OneWayFly will issue a genuine ticket valid for 14 days. They cancel it themselves later, but you’ve got valid documentation for the immigration desk.

When hand luggage only pays off

Travelling with hand luggage only can save you money. With full-service airlines a checked bag is usually included in the price, but with low-cost flights you have to pay extra for it.

But is the money you save worth the hassle of squeezing everything into the weight and size limits of a cabin bag?

Bear in mind that the limits for the bag you take into the cabin are usually very strict. Often it can’t weigh more than seven kilos! And given that the bag or case itself weighs over two kilos, there really isn’t much room left for your stuff.

In our experience it’s pretty comfortable to fly with hand luggage only for long weekends, but for longer trips it just isn’t worth it for us. So weigh it up for yourself: the £30 or so saved on a checked bag, or 20 kg of extra capacity.

Tips for cheap flights

Read all the way to here? Then you’re clearly serious about finding cheap flights! We’ve passed on all the knowledge and experience we have. So off you go — go find your dream cheap flights!

If you’ve got any follow-up questions, or your own tips on how to save even more on flights, drop us a comment below the article.

PLANNING A TRIP? THEN YOU’LL WANT TO READ THIS: