Overview
For travelling overseas and interstate, booking an airline ticket is always a hassle. Off-late you can even book tickets online but it requires some tact.
Here are the tips and hacks that will enable you to book tickets online, save your time and some money too.
Keep your searches Top Secret
You must have noticed that flight price changes after searching it few times in your web browser. This because of cookies, flight prices do increase when a particular path is searched over and over again. This is because the site wants you to make faster decisions into booking your tickets before the prices really do increase. This can be avoided by searching for prices in incognito or private mode.
This mode is available in every browser, like for Firefox or Internet Explorer you need to press Ctrl+Shift+P and for Google Chrome or Safari you can enable incognito mode by toggling Ctrl+Shift+N. This will open a new window that will not track your previous visited paths and hence won’t show inflated costs. The cookies are reset every time when you open a new window. To start your search from beginning, just close all the incognito window and perform your flight search again.
Use the best flight search engines
Most of the search engines show you the bloated flight rates as part of their cut from the airlines. Some search engines show much more inflated rates compared to others. It is important to have atleast vague idea about flight rates of a few sites.
Know the cheapest day to travel
It is known and logical fact, that suggests you travel on a weekday and stay over the weekend and return by late night weekend flight or early morning flight the next day. And if you book these tickets on a weekday, you can get a cheaper deal as sites show reasonable amount. You can even start looking 21 days in advance.
You can also check out prices for just one-way trip, instead of round-trip over different search engines. Doing this will give you a better idea as to which days are cheaper to fly in/out on your round trip.
Budget Airlines
These airlines are here to serve everyone especially for shorter distance. While travelling with these airlines, you may have to give up on few things like leg space, free drinks/food (that are covered in a higher-priced ticket with full-service).
Remember that if you are going for the cheapest flight, read all the fine print, be flexible, know your resources and know about their safety services.
Long-haul Flights
A flight that has a stop-over or two is considerably cheaper especially if your are flying abroad. First, do your research with budget airlines and see what is the offered amount on your dedicated dates. This legwork can also be done by a travel agent as they get some discounted prices. If you can show the rates that you found, agents may try to match it and include added stop over at the desired destination, if only you wish to.
Cheapest places
If you haveb’t zeroed in on a destination yet, a good idea will be to check ticket prices and curreny(while travelling abroad) of various locations and pick on that suits your budget. For this, you have to be very much accustomed to booking air tickets and know about various budget airlines in the respective country.
If you know your anticipated destination and want a map view for the specific days of the week, use Google Flights. You will get a map overlay with similar prices for various airports, but with the advantage of brief departure dates.
Go to a Travel Agent
Travel agents have access to special undercuts that are not available to others. But that doesn’t ensure that they can always provide you with the best price. Do your research and provide the rates that are according to your margin and present it your travel agent, see if they can match it or beat it. This is beneficial especially for long-haul flights, where even slightest of savings can equate to around thousands of rupees.
Go Local
Most search engines do not include small airlines, especially those that are less popular and booked for remote regions. There are domestic airlines like Trujet, Air Pegasis, Air Carnival likes, which operate in southern or south-west regions. So if you are travelling to the south, check out these airlines.
Even when you find small airlines in your search, it is better to check the company site, it may offer some deals that the search engines do not show.
Don’t wait, just book
If you already know when and where to go, then do not wait for any schematic deals to show u. It is only logical to book the tickets as early as possible because it doesn’t get cheaper as your departure dates approach. More often than not, you are able to save big bucks by booking way in advance.
Look out for Airfare Errors
Airlines sometimes make mistakes while updating the airfare, this can be due to currency conversion mishaps, technical glitches or plain human error, etc. There is a remote possibility of this occurring but is better to be careful than sorry.
