How To Find Cheap Flights In 12 Easy Steps
You search for your flight to Paris and find a great price. But you are not ready to book it yet. You just want to think about it and go to make dinner.
You come back 2 hours later, and voilà! Your $500 flight is now $750.
Same day, same airline, same flight!
This used to happen to me ALL THE TIME.
Some websites claim this isn’t true, but I have witnessed it with my own eyes: prices go up if you keep searching for a specific route!
Airlines use cookies in your browser to make you believe the prices are rising, and you need to book NOW to save as much as possible.
Always search for cheap flights in incognito mode or private browsing mode for the lowest prices.
NOTE: Will browsing in incognito lead to cheaper deals? Not really! But it will prevent your airfare from going up once you find a good deal!
But what is incognito mode?
Incognito mode, private browsing, and InPrivatebBrowsing all do the same thing – they just use different names. Incognito mode ensures nothing from your session is logged in your browser history, search history, temporary internet files, or cookies.
Any data you enter during a private session will be forgotten by your computer when you close the browser.
So how can you find your cheap flight in incognito mode?
Go Incognito on Google Chrome
- Open Google Chrome and click the wrench icon in the top right corner.
- Click ‘new incognito window.’
- Alternatively, you can press Ctrl + Shift + N.
You can tell if you’re browsing privately by looking for the person’s logo in disguise in the window’s top-left corner. He’s wearing sunglasses and a secret agent hat.
Go Incognito on Mozilla Firefox
- Open Firefox and click the hamburger Menu button – it looks like three parallel lines.
- Click ‘New private window.’
Go Incognito on Safari on Mac
- Open Safari and click on ‘File.’
- Click ‘New Private Window.’
- Alternatively, click Command + Shift + N.
Go Incognito on Microsoft Edge
- Open Microsoft Edge and click the ‘More’ icon – it looks like three dots.
- Click ‘New InPrivate window.’
Open a new incognito or private window between new searches, as cookies are reset and deleted between each session.
Doing this will give you the best chance to find cheap flights without being fooled by airlines.
3. Grab error fares super fast!
Have you ever heard of error fares?
Airlines occasionally make mistakes due to computer glitches, human error, or currency conversion mistakes, which lead to unbelievably discounted cheap flights. These are known as error or mistake fares.
Among thousands of flights, errors in the prices of flight tickets are inevitable. And because it would be too time-consuming for airlines to correct any ‘price with a mistake,’ they often honor such bookings.
You can try spotting error fares yourself, but that can be time-consuming. Plus, some deals are only available for a few hours before the airline spots the “mistake.”
The most straightforward approach to finding ‘error fares’ is following the specialized hot-deal-hunters.
Here are my favorite resources:
Scott’s Cheap Flights
Scott’s Cheap Flights is one of my favorites for cheap flights around the world! The cheap subscription is pretty cool, but I recommend the paid subscription if you are a frequent traveler. Not only is it ridiculously cheap for all the extra updates (and if you subscribe to the free version, you get a 20% in your inbox for the paid one!), but it MORE than pays for itself with one booked ticket!
Secret Flying
Secret Flying is one of the most popular sources for error fare detection for flights to all destinations worldwide, with over 3 million visitors a month. You can simply check their website, subscribe to their email, and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to look for the best deals.
Jack’s Flight Club
Jack’s Flight Club is my favorite for the cheapest flights and error fares in Europe. You can sign up for alerts via email or by downloading their app. For example, I received an email today for a return flight from London to Venice for only 30EUR.
Airfare Watchdog
Airfare WatchDog lists “Today’s Top Fares” on the homepage of its site. If you don’t have a specific destination you are looking for, this list alone can be full of bargains. When you subscribe to their email list, they also allow you to create flight alerts to specific destinations. This one is one of the best features that sets Airfare Watchdog apart from other sites.
The Flight Deal
This site is excellent for global flight deals and offers discounted rates for flights and hotels, cars, and top deals for credit card purchases. You can subscribe to their newsletters and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.
There are plenty of other great “error fare” websites out there! Rose, for example, saved over $600 on her flight using Thrifty Traveler!
Rose from The Compass Rose
“Most travel bloggers are persistent in their quest to find cheap flights, but we don’t have the time to look at every airline every day. There may be a fantastic deal that gets us close to our destination or a mistake fare to somewhere that is not in “the plan” but is too cheap to pass up!
These deals are emailed to me regularly via a flight alert service called Thrifty Traveler. I can set up alerts from or to specific destinations or just receive alerts for every deal they find!
I’d been planning a trip to Europe when I received an email about round-trip flights from Minneapolis to Berlin for just $336. That’s $643 cheaper than usual for my dates, according to Google Flights!
A subscription to Thrifty Traveler Premium is $40 a year and quickly pays for itself. This kind of service is especially valuable to those of us flying from small and mid-sized airports where there aren’t the everyday deals you see from JFK, LAX, etc.”
4. Price alert!
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