We all know that feeling. We're sitting at home,
scrolling through Instagram.
We find our dream travel destination, but when it comes time to book tickets
too expensive.
Don't worry. We're here to help. I'm Alex
I'm Marko
and you are watching Vagabrothers, your go-to guide for travel tips, vlogs, and
inspiration here on YouTube. Flights are still the single largest cost of travel.
But the good news is that the internet, competition, and technology have driven prices down making affordable
flights easier to find than ever. If you find this video helpful, make sure you the thumbs -up, share with your travel buddies
adding your own tips in the comment section ,and subscribe,
and turn on notifications, if you have not already. Follow these tips and sure to be smooth flying.
This video is going to share a bunch of tricks and hacks to get you the cheapest flights possible.
But first things first, you need to know where to look. Enter flight
aggregators. These are websites or apps that search the entire
internet to find you the cheapest possible flights for whichever destination
you're trying to fly to. Get ready to bookmark these pages and download these apps. First up: Kayak.
That's me kayaking. Wow.
It's a good place to start because its simple design lays out fares from around the web and allows you to easily compare against other
search aggregators such as Travelocity or Expedia.
We really love their Explore Option which basically allows you to put in your budget and your interest and
find flights to places you didn't even know existed.
Talking about destinations, this brings us to our second tip which is: be flexible with your destination.
Let's say that you want to go to Costa Rica for your trip, but flights are much cheaper to Panama.
Why not go there? Give it a shot and often times the
different destination is switched. Not even that big of a deal. Could be like two different cities within the same country.
I just went to Costa Rica.....
Again for the fifth time. I love it and there were cheap options to Panama, but
I got a good flight, got a good price for a roundtrip ticket to Costa Rica with Carrie.
It was awesome.
Next up check out Google Flights,
which has evolved a lot since it was first released a couple years ago, and now includes a really cool
Discover Destination feature, which literally allows you to find places you would never have actually traveled to beforehand.
It does save you money, but more than anything it shows you cheaper alternatives, like broadens your horizons.
It does kind of ..like travel without even having traveled yet. It is Google,so it's really a thorough search engine.
It's going to get you a lot of great results. It's very quick,
but one of the best features is this Track Prices feature.
Essentially allows you to know when the price is going to go up or if it drops.
That's because shifting your departure or your return by just a day or two can actually save you tons of cash.
Inconvenience saves money. This is just pure supply and demand. Instead save money by flying when nobody else wants to fly.
Red-eye flights. 6:00 a.m. flights.
Better yet?
Fly on the holiday because the planes will be empty, and you will get a much cheaper fare.
Nothing like celebrating Christmas at 30,000 feet, but
honestly if you go this route, this is where the website SleepingInAirports.com is super helpful.
You can buy flights at horrible
departure times and the website will help you find the perfect bench where you can curl up and sleep until your flight's ready to go.
It's just like crowd-sourced nap space.
It is crowdsource nap spaces, wi-fi, plugs, everything. Sleepinginairports.com. Go check it out. All right now
Let's get ready to bust some myths.
So I don't really remember where I was or who told me,
but this guy like said that flights were cheaper if you buy them on like a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Is that true, Bros?
It used to be true back in the day when like human
employees of airlines would dump tickets on Tuesdays and Wednesdays to create flash sales, but the truth is that most of that stuff nowadays
automated by computers, so it doesn't really happen anymore. I thought you're going to say back in the day when humans existed.
Kind of getting scared.
What about
websites like the one with the little gnome guy? Do they save you money?
The truth is they don't save you as much money as they did when they first disrupted the industry.
But they do help you save time in finding the best cheapest flights in general and also they can be really useful in the
off season providing last-minute tickets. But in all seriousness,
flights are usually at their cheapest around six weeks before departure. If you're not quite sure when to buy,
use the app called Hopper, which gives you notification when it thinks the prices are going to go up or down.
Another website that bookmark is Momondo, a super solid website with a great app that's well-designed, functional, and easy to use.
Momondo clearly presents all of your flight information with a really nifty graph.
It shows cheapest, best overall, and
quickest. Another great feature is the Trip Finder function, which allows you to refine your search based upon when want to go,
what you want to do,
and what part of the world you're looking at. This brings us to our next tip: when you're booking your flights, keep in mind
the price of the destination. For example, Norwegian Air has very cheap flights from LAX to Copenhagen
But Copenhagen is not a cheap city. Another great website is Skyscanner,
which is one of the first aggregators and is super useful in Europe where it brings together budget airlines such as Ryanair and Easyjet.
Skyscanner is not exclusive to Europe. You can find cheap airfare to North America and Asia as well.
But just keep in mind that they tend to do Europe right.That brings us to our next point:
No matter where you find your fare,
you should always try to book it directly through the airline, especially to its budget airlines which don't always post their cheapest fares to
aggregator websites. Honestly sometimes it's better to just pick up a phone and speak to an airline representative.
Chances are they can match the price that you found online or give you deals that haven't yet been published.
So here is a roundup of the cheapest budget airlines around the world. For transatlantic flights, make sure you check out
Norwegian Airlines. It's a no frills budget airline that offers flights from
LAX and the west coast United States all the way to Europe for just a few hundred bucks. Of course they achieve this by
cramming you into an airplane.
It's not a lot of creature comforts, nothing really included with the flight just the passage, so if you want food water
whatever extra, you have to pay for it. Another great airline is Wow, which also offers bunch of flights to Europe
but with a stopover in Iceland, which could be a great trip in itself.
So if you're planning the great Game of Thrones
pilgrimage, maybe just fly with Wow. Go to Iceland, spend a couple of days, you know
fighting off the White Walkers and then continue on your merry way to Europe.
Maybe to Northern Ireland. Drop into Winterfell.
Easy. If you haven't seen our video on the 29 Most Amazing Game of Thrones
destinations that you can actually visit right now, you should check that video out later after you finish this one. Within Europe you have
Easyjet and Ryanair,
which have fares for under 10 Euros. I once flew from Spain to Morocco for 15 Euros.
No lie. Just be careful. Take a look because they do have baggage fees and there are some hidden costs.
So make sure that you read the fine print when you're booking for either of those airlines.
And another thing to watch out for is the location of the area of the airport. For example if you fly to Barcelona,
sometimes they'll fly you into Girona, which is a great city which is just an hour outside of Barcelona. For the
States, check out Virgin America,
Spirit Airlines,
Jetblue ,and Southwest, which offer flash sales from time to time. For Canada try West Jet. For Latin America,
we recommend the airlines Lan and Avianca. If you're trying to get to Brazil, Azul Brazil will take you to the
Paiz Tropicao.
Belieza.
For Southeast Asia, Air Asia is usually your best bet. it flies to Australia as well as some other
definitions outside of Asia. If you're going to Australia, use JetStar, Australian for cheap airfare.
Actually, it's a budget wing of Qantas and there's also Jetstar Asia,
which is based out of Singapore and flies throughout the whole Asia Pacific region.
Lastly Indigo is the budget airline for India. Please pronounce Indigo. Ah get it?
I thought it was India Go Go. Indigo Indigo and Indigo.
Wherever you choose to find your airfare, make sure you remember this tip:
Always browse in private mode and clear your cookies.
Dude, isn't private browsing for, you know, watching..... No, it's for getting cheap airfare. Freak.
This is super important because these websites track your browsing history,
and if they know that you're looking at something often,
the price will continue to go up and up. For example, if you wanted to go to Dublin
but then went and look somewhere else,
and then came back to Dublin, it might be more expensive. That's because you're not browsing in private mode.
You browsing the private mode? Always, yes? Yeah
Browse in private.
Another technique is to sign up for fare alerts. This is not ideal
if you need to go to a specific place at a specific time,
but it's kind of 21st century of clipping coupons. You see a great deal, and you go for it.
So it's good for people who are spontaneous
or who will chase cheap fares to travel more often. To start sign up for email alerts from Airfare Watchdog,
which has real human beings browsing the internet for cheap fares, not robots.
Unfortunately, that sounds really sad because, I mean, what do they do? They're just browsing the internet for cheap airfare all the time
Yeah.
If you're more into Twitter, you can follow the Flight Deal, which publishes
multiple great deals from around the world every single day. Also check out Seekerflying.com. It's a website that publishes
what's called Error Fares. That's literally when a human employee puts in a fare as a sub
average price, so it's just
accidentally really cheap.
Accidentally awesome. Sorry, boss.
I didn't mean to give them that super cheap fare. Of course, you can always redeem your frequent flyer miles for flights.
This works super well with last-minute
flight bookings when the dollar cost is high but the mileage cost is lower.
It is debatable whether all the hassle of getting frequent flyer miles is actually worth it.
But at the very least, you can open account with
airlines that you're traveling on and enter in your frequent flyer number and that way you will at least be saving miles
for the next time you fly. A great way to save money and actually make money
after you've booked your ticket
is to get bumped. Getting bumped is basically getting paid by the airline to take a later flight. A lot of the time, airlines oversell.
They over booked these flights,
and when they're super-duper booked ,they basically give you money and a hotel and
money for food to wait until they can put you on a less crowded flight.
There's a policy that's been going on for tons of years
It's because statistically there are always going to be a certain number people who missed their flight.
So the airline sells more flights than exist on the airplane.
Obviously this has become controversial since the video from the United Airlines flight of the guy getting dragged off the plane went viral.
Since that incident has happened, the airlines have adjusted their policies to basically increase the amount of money they can give you. For example,
Delta Airlines just raised its limit to up to 10,000 dollars to get paid to take a later flight. Get bumped. Get bumped.
Bump it up. What? Go bump it up. Well 500 bucks?
Oh hell, no thousand? Well, maybe. Oh how about two? That sounds good to me
But 10 K... gonna flop a fruity. Go bump it up.
So if all that's too much for you to deal with, there is a new app called Air Health. It basically tracks your flights. You just
scan your boarding pass,
and it knows what your flight is and it tracks to see if it gets delayed.
In some cases when your flight is delayed, the airline owes you money and this app
automatically files a claim on your behalf with the airline. The average results from this claim is five to six hundred bucks.
Now there is a catch:
they will take 25 %.
Last not least, if you're going all the way around the world, as in a one year
all the way around the world trip, there are special tickets for that called Round-the-World tickets.
They come out a lot cheaper than you'd expect, even with all the stops.
They are about two to four thousand dollars for about a half dozen to a dozen stops. Anyways go check it out for yourself
There's a link below to Airtreks.com. They have a cool tool
that allows you to estimate how much your dream trip would cost. All the websites and apps that we've mentioned will be linked in the
description box. if you guys have any tips of your own, please
do us and all the travelers out there a favor and leave those tips in the comment section. If you enjoy this video
you know what to do: give it a big thumbs -up, share with your friends and subscribe and turn on notifications
if you have not already. Ok guys, hope you enjoyed that video. In the meantime stay curious, keep exploring, and we'll see you guys
on the runway.
Peace.
you