These are a few resources that have worked well for us. Taking the time to do a bit of planning and legwork in order to get a really good deal has worked well for us and allowed us to spend hard-earned money on fun vacation experiences not long expensive flights.
By “planning” we mean have some times of year and destinations in mind so that you can determine what a great price would be and so you can be ready in case your equivalent of Madrid-for-$490 comes up.
(You’ll notice we don’t detail what day of the week or even time of day to purchase tickets. Kayak, airfarewatchdog, and other sites can probably help you get slightly cheaper flights but since flights are the biggest cost of our trips we try to plan a bit more in order to save big.)
The Flight Deal
- daily email with the best deals we’ve ever seen
- deals are temporary so be ready to act fast
- easy way to track different destinations (worldwide)
- Notes: Madrid 2017 for $490!!
Hopper
- mobile app for when to fly and when to buy
- great way to track multiple flights
Google flights
- look at prices over many dates
- flexible destinations too
- Alerts to price drops (e.g., when your city to Rome drops below a certain price)
A couple others that might be useful…
Skyscanner
- Good for exploring destinations, like Google flights you can look at flight prices over weeks and months
Scott’s Cheap flights
- Scott finds “errors” in flight prices, shares them with subscribers
- premium membership (i.e., there’s a fee)
- recommended to us by friends but we haven’t tried it yet
talk soon,
Dan & Betsy
Family Discussion topic: Who in your family (kids included) is tech savvy enough to take on some of this research?