How to Save Money On Airfare

1. Use Bing.com/Travel, which is an airfare price predictor. It’ll tell you whether or not you should wait to buy the ticket you’re interested in and help you save money.  Though it’s generally true that the cost of a plane ticket increases as you get closer to departure date, that’s not a rule that’s true 100% of the time.  As a result, sometimes if you wait a day or two, the price of your plane ticket could decrease (the price of plane ticket is often based on +20 variables).  Bing.com/Travel tries to make sense of all of that math and tells you whether you should buy now or wait.   The Bing website states, “According to a third-party audit of our predictive technology, we’re about 75% accurate and on average, customers will save over $50 on a typical round-trip transaction.”
2. Sign up for Southwest.com‘s emails about travel deals (and enter your home airport and favorite destinations so that you get relevant deals sent to your inbox).
3. Visit Kayak.com/Buzz, which lets you enter the maximum amount of money you’re willing to spend on a plane flight and where you want to go without setting a date, and it’ll tell you when you should fly to get the minimum price possible.
4. When you book a flight, always enter your frequent flyer number (get one if you don’t have one).  That way, after awhile, you’ll get a free flight.
5. Use Priceline.com. Priceline.com is a website that lets you bid on travel expenses including flights, hotels, rental cars, vacation packages and cruises.  Even better, there’s a website called BidOnTravel.com that explains the best Priceline bidding strategies.
6. Always look at the price of your flight +/-3 days. StudentUniverse.com (just for college students, faculty and staff) and Kayak.com allow you to indicate the ideal dates of your flights and then can show you prices for all combinations of three days before and three days after your indicated dates.  Sometimes, if you change your departure date or arrival date by just a single day, you can save a lot of money.
7. Read Kayak.com’s list of seven steps to finding the lowest fare possible.
   
8. When buying a plane ticket, always use a website that searches hundreds of airlines at the same time like Kayak.com, Fly.com or StudentUniverse.com (just for college students, faculty and staff).  In fact, one of the the best ways to save money is to use all three.
9. Use Kayak.com’s price alerts to know immediately when the price of the plane ticket you want to buy drops below a certain point.
10. Always try to book your plane ticket as early as possible. It’s not an absolute rule that the price of a plane ticket increases over time, but it is quite common.  If you’re not going to use a flight price predictor (described elsewhere on this list), then booking your flight early is a good rule to go by to save money.
11. When booking a flight, always go directly to the website of the airline if you find the flight you want on an aggregator website (described elsewhere on this list).  Doing so means that you’ll save money by cutting out any commission that any other person might be making.
12. Fly within Europe using Europe’s discount airlines, RyanAir.com or EasyJet.com.
13. When booking a flight, do it online. Not only will you be able to see more options, but many airlines charge a phone booking fee if you call-in your purchase.
14. Factor the cost of checking bags into your airline ticket purchasing decision. For instance, Southwest doesn’t charge to check bags (at least at the time this was written).  Thus, if Continental is offering a flight for $200 but you plan to check a bag for a $15 fee and Southwest is offering the same flight for $205, then it still makes sense to buy the more expensive Southwest ticket because you’ll save money overall.
15. If you’re looking to purchase a one way ticket, check out Southwest.com. Southwest Airlines prices each leg of its flights individually (so the sum of the legs should equal the price of the round trip ticket).  Many other airlines, however, price one way tickets differently (and more expensively).  Often, one way tickets from other airlines can cost more than half the price of a round trip ticket to and from the same location.  Sometimes they can even cost more than an entire round trip ticket.