How to Find Cheap Flights to Anywhere

One of our biggest pet peeves of traveling is finding the perfect destination, scoring an awesome deal on a hotel, getting our time-off from work approved and then checking Google Flights and realizing flights are going to cost more than the hotel, food, and attractions put together…urgh. So, what to do now? Bite the bullet and buy the high price tickets because you’re worried they will go up or take the gamble that tomorrow they will go down? Who else is familiar with the cat and mouse flight ticket game? We’re here to tell you that you are going about it ALL wrong. So check out how we have successfully found cheap flights to anywhere!

Be Extremely Flexible

Instead of picking your destination and booking your hotel first, do it the other way around. Search for cheap flight deals first and then worry about your hotel. If you’re not picky about your destination (and you just want to see the entire world like we do) then this strategy can pay out in dividends. If you’ve got your heart set on a specific destination these strategies will still work but you won’t have as lucrative of a savings.

Subscribe to Flight Deal Tracker

Yes, we are telling you to spend a little bit of money, but trust us for a minute. The subscription fees are extremely reasonable and whatever you spend, you will save ten times that amount on flight tickets. Our two favorite subscription based Flight Deal Trackers are Dollar Flight Club and Scott’s Cheap Flights. We’ve seen flights from Washington D.C. to Italy, Norway, and Spain for as low as $280 round trip!

Dollar Flight Club

Dollar Flight Club is $9 per month or $40 for the entire year if paid upfront. You can also opt to stick with the free plan but you won’t see as many flight deals in your inbox. When you sign up, you pick a region you will be flying from and then you pick your favorite destinations. You will then get e-mails to your inbox with the best flight deals.

Scott’s Cheap Flights

Scott’s Cheap Flights is $39 per year for the premium or you can sign up for the free version but you won’t get all the deals, just some of them. When you sign up, you pick your preferred departure airports (I would recommend picking at least 5 near you). Scott’s Cheap Flights will then e-mail you cheap flights to anywhere from those departure airports. We’ve gotten as many as 5 e-mails in one day with cheap flights!

Google Flights Searcher

Google Flights is our favorite flight search engine when we have a specific destination in mind and we have a certain amount of time we want to go away for, let’s say a long weekend, but don’t really care about when we go. We used this exact strategy when we flew to Iceland and knew we wanted to leave on a Wednesday and come back on a Sunday.

By using Google Flights, we were able to find a flight on WOW Air for $199 round-trip from Baltimore to Reykjavik. Let’s look at an example, we have been looking at going to Hawaii recently so I’ve been on the hunt for cheap flights. The airports closest to us are Baltimore, Dulles, and Reagan (you can search these all at once in Google Flights under ‘Washington DC’). So, in Google Flights we are going to put in Washington DC as the departure and Maui as the destination and we want to go for 4 nights in April or May.

Now, look at the above example, if we went for 4 nights leaving on April 17th and coming back on April 21st, we would pay $764 per person round trip…not much of a deal. However, Google highlighted for us in green lettering that if we were to leave on May 9th and spend 4 nights, our round trip price would be $465…now that’s what I’m talking about! There’s an overall savings on two tickets of almost $600, which could buy some nice meals and excursions in Hawaii!

One caveat to Google Flights is that it does not search Southwest Flights. The good news though is that Southwest actually has a similar function right on their website. It’s called the Low Fare Calendar and works much the same way as Google Flights does.

Now, keep in mind that just because the flight is cheap doesn’t mean it’s the best flight. Often times, the cheapest flights will have the crappiest times and multiple layovers. To avoid this, Google Flights has filters you can add so it will only search flights in the certain time range and duration you want. In the below example you can see that you can filter for number of stops, specific airlines, price, times, connecting airports, and total flight duration. You can also search one way flights to see if it ends up being cheaper to buy two one way tickets then one round trip flight ticket.

Check Online Travel Agencies for Better Prices

Once you’ve identified your super cheap flight to anywhere on either Dollar Flight Club, Scott’s Cheap Flights, or Google Flights, it’s time to head over to the online travel agencies. Our favorites that we always check are Expedia, Kayak, and Momondo. Below is an example of Momondo with the same parameters as the above search in Google Flights. You can see that Momondo also gives you several options and to the right gives you the option to compare to other Online Travel Agencies like Expedia, Travelocity, and Priceline.

Check Alternative Airports

We mentioned above that our closest airports are Baltimore, Dulles and Reagan but there are so many more within a 5 hours car, bus, or train ride. To the north, we have Philadelphia and New York and to the south, we have Raleigh and Charlotte. We will gladly pay a $50 train ticket upto Penn Station to fly out of JFK if it’s going to save us $300-$500 (which it can when flying to Europe).

So our advice for finding cheap flights to anywhere would be to familiarize yourself with your nearest airports. Make note of the biggest airports close to you as they will most often have the cheapest flights and make sure you’re willing to either drive, hop a bus, or take a train to get there. You will also want to do a cost benefit analysis – if we’re only going to save $100 by going out of JFK instead of Dulles, well then it’s not worth it to buy the $50 train ticket to get up there.

Flight Tracker Apps

Let’s say you have a wedding to go to and your dates of travel and destination are non-negotiable. You aren’t completely out of luck for finding a cheap flight. There are several apps you can download like Sky Scanner and Hopper that will help you track a specific flight.

The way it works is you put in a departure location, destination location and dates of travel. You can click watch to add the flight to your watch list and you will get alerts (make sure you turn notifications on!) when the flight price goes down. Below is a screenshot of Hopper –

Fly Budget Airlines

It seems like budget airlines are popping up everywhere these days – the United States, Europe, even Asia all have budget airlines. We have flown both WOW Air to Europe and Spirit Airlines to Florida. Our only advice when booking budget airlines is to have realistic expectations of what you’re getting. Most budget airlines do not have reclining seats, have less legroom, and will upcharge you for everything. With most budget airlines, seats, luggage, and meals are all extra. Now, if you don’t care about where you sit, you only bring a carry-on, and you bring snacks instead of ordering a meal, it’s a great way to save a lot of money.

One Spirit airline hack we learned to save additional money is to buy tickets at the counter. It should be no surprise if you have been reading our blog for a while now that we are huge Disney fans. So, we did a search on Google Flights and found a cheap flight for $89.59 round trip for May 15-18th on Spirit Airlines (which is a pretty good price anyway). In the example below, you will see that the Passenger Fee for the outbound flight to Orlando is $14.99 and the inbound Passenger Fee is $19.99. Well, if you go to the airport and buy directly from the Spirit ticket counter, they will waive the fee. That’s a savings of $34.98 and times two that’s $69.96 so that $89.59 ticket just became $54.61! If you live close to an airport (like we do) and can run over and purchase a Spirit plane ticket from the counter, this is a great option.

So, there you have it, our tried and true methods for finding cheap flights to anywhere. Flights don’t have to be the most expensive part of your vacation if you know where to look and you master these hacks for finding cheap flights. Let us know by posting below if you were able to find a really good cheap flight to anywhere using these methods!

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