Travel

However, it is possible to get the cheapest flights ones top flight finders like Expedia and Hotwire won t show you. And if you plan ahead and employ some high-level bargain ninja tactics, you will find the cheapest flights ever.

The first thing any seasoned business traveler will tell you about finding the best fares is an oft-repeated bit of travel lore that happens to ring true. But after midnight on a Tuesday.

So why is this particular bit of advice so common when booking a trip? Because it works!

While many of the whys and hows of scoring cheap flights is indeed a mystery, we do know that airlines tend to follow certain patterns and that after midnight on Tuesday, it is on for a bargainista.

Travel expert Peter Greenberg explains :

some, but not all, of the majors will match that fare. By late Monday, depending on how that new fare is doing in the marketplace, Airline C might jump into the battle and offer an even lower fare, so look for all the other airlines to rush to match that one – usually by Tuesday – and the war is on. Prices might go even lower on Wednesday. And that s when you strike.

So, you ve been around the internet a bit. You Facebook all day, you shop, you check your mail and it s here we get a bit more insight into how to hack a cheap flight.

Just like when you shop for sneakers or cars, algorithms are watching. And airlines will know when you might be willing to pay a bit more for that flight.

Yes, the airfares you see are based on lots of factors. And if you want to see the cheapest fares and have already been shopping around, you have to trick those tricksters back.

Google s Chrome browser is highly regarded as a top choice for general internet use and one easy to use feature is key in getting the cheapest flights available. If you right-click any link, the option to Open Link In An Incognito Window will be the second choice on the drop-down menu.

By shopping for flights incognito. you ensure your previous window-shopping doesn t hide the cheapest fares.

Everything good on the internet, even the cheapest flights, is discovered first by geeks.

Expedia, Hotwire, Priceline and their brethren are great starting points for finding flights. But if you want a really nerdy approach to getting the lowest fares, a new travel search engine uses math to show you your best options.

H ipmunk is a newer flight search matrix co-founded in part by Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman. And if you re flexible about dates, get ready for the best flight pricing visual available on the web.

Hipmunk doesn t open up twenty windows and clog up your screen. The adorable site mascot appears during a quick search, after you enter your travel parameters (one-way, round-trip, or pricegraph ) and then the flight shopping fun begins.

If you ve got to be in Denver at 7 PM on August 5, this cheap fare trick won t help. But most people have a little wiggle room for travel planning, and when you know how to use flexibility to its utmost, cheap flights abound.

As we mentioned, Hipmunk is a great tool for flight searching. It even sorts flights by agony, so if you want to pay a little (a little, don t go crazy) more for no layovers or shorter flights, that s all worked into the sorting style for your fares. Super cool.

We also briefly touched on the pricegraph function that makes Hipmunk so useful.

Instead of keeping track of all the cheapest flights per search, Hipmunk puts them on a 90-day visual graph, so you can select the absolute cheapest fare available.

The graphing element of flight search is unbelievably useful to find the cheapest flights, enabling you to see the peaks and ebbs of airfare pricing in a three month window.

But wait! There s more!

Need to travel outside the 90-day box? There s a trick to see flights over a longer period, but it s a manual workaround. In the address bar, the dates you ve selected are part of the address. Alter them to add more days to either end, and you will see a larger graph.

Flying at low-peak or low-demand times will shave even more dollars off your fare. Tuesday through Thursday are the cheapest days to fly, so if you can stretch to a longer stay, you can save beaucoup bucks on your flight.

Not all tips will work, but combining these strategies will definitely help in your search for the cheapest flight ever.

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