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!