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Flexible dates means cheaper airfare





#search for cheap airline tickets #

Cheap Airfares

Get cheaper fares by being flexible with your travel dates

If you insist on traveling on specific days, you'll pay a lot more for airfares. But if you're flexible about exactly when you leave and return, you can get much better deals. This is our #1 tip for getting the cheapest airfare! It bears repeating: Be flexible, pay less.

Sample fares we just checked:

  • $444 - Leave on the 5th and insist on returning on the 7th
  • $333 - Leave on the 5th and willing to return on the 8th

Use the services below to get great deals when your travel plans have some leeway.

Search Engines

Most search engines now do flexible-date searches. Here's how the different engines handle them:

  • Kayak is usually the best. When you put in your cities, it shows you a calendar of the lowest fares for each day of the month. Sweet! The catch is that it shows you only fares for city/date combos that other users have already searched for. If you're doing a popular route (like NYC to LA), you'll likely see a price for every day, but going from Somewhere, Idaho to Somewhere, Montana there's gonna be some holes in the calendar. But even if the calendar doesn't have the dates you want, Kayak also has more powerful flexible-dates searching than the other engines. You can choose +/- 1-3 days, or search all upcoming weekends for the cheapest one, or find the cheapest flight occurring in a one-month period. Nice!
  • Skyscanner . Search for flexible dates for a whole month or even a whole year! The catch is the same as Kayak's: It shows only cached results from specific searches that other users have done.
  • Travelocity and Orbitz each has a button that lets you search +/- 1-3 days.
  • Hipmunk lets you search + OR - 2 days from the departure or return date you type in, but not both + AND - at the same time. There's a way to get a calendar similar to Kayak's but it's rather complicated. I hope they fix this.

    Weekly Netfares

    Every Wednesday the airlines offer deep discounts on undersold flights for that weekend. Downsides: You usually have to leave on Thu/Fri/Sat and return on Sun/Mon, and your choices of cities are limited. As I'm typing this, the only trips available from Austin are Denver ($147) or El Paso ($87), but those are excellent deals for roundtrip airfare.

    Rather than having to visit each airline website separately, just go to Best Fares and choose the city you want to travel from. Then they'll show you all the deals from all the major airlines. Many of these are decidedly cheap.

    Of course, you can sign up at the individual airlines' sites if you prefer. Here are the links:

    Fare Alerts by email

    Lots of sites offer a "Fare Alert" service, sending you an email about low fares between particular cities. But you only need one, and Kayak's fare alert service is pretty good.

    Cheapest flights from your city

    Airfare Watchdog lets you put in your departure city, and then shows the cheapest fares from there to various cities around the country and the world.

    Portals / Home Pages

    Thanks for visiting, and I hope you liked the site. I'll leave you with a couple of hand-picked ads.



  • Views: 280 | Added by: b0ss_putuxyyj56 | Tags: Flexible, Cheaper, Dates, means, airfare | Rating: 0.0/0
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