For independent travelers, budget planning usually begins with airline tickets. If you know some search secrets, you can find the best deals and save a lot.
Passengers who have bought tickets at completely different prices, sometimes several times different, can sit side by side in the same plane. It depends on when, where and how each of them purchased the ticket. Moreover, the rule "the sooner, the cheaper" does not always work. How to find the best deals.
1. There are communities of independent travelers - usually forums or groups on social networks. People there share their "finds" of the cheapest tickets. Keeping up with the news is one of the best ways to find a ticket at the best price at the right time.
2. Subscribe to mailing lists of airlines on their websites - so you will receive information about promotions and discounts that are regularly held.
3. To search for tickets, use aggregator sites such as Momondo or SkyScanner. It is very easy to track price changes depending on the departure date. They collect information about the price in various sales agencies, where prices are often lower than on the official websites of the airlines. Do not be afraid to buy from agencies, because tickets come to your mail almost immediately after purchase, and you can always check them at the airline by number or last name. But never buy tickets from individuals who ask to transfer money to their card or Yandex wallet! Perhaps the price will be tempting, but it is highly likely that this is a common scam.
4. Look for flights from nearby cities. For example, for residents of St. Petersburg these are Helsinki, Lappeenranta, Tampere, Tallinn, Riga. European low-cost airlines fly from there.
5. Pay attention to promotions from European cities. They can be tracked on European versions of airline websites or on airlines that do not fly from Russia. For example, there are often promotions from Paris to the islands in the Caribbean - Saint Martin, Martinique or Guadeloupe. From Munich, Frankfurt or Madrid there are good prices for flights to South America.
6. Sometimes "open joe" is much cheaper, for no apparent reason. Open Joe is a route in which a passenger arrives in one city and departs from another. But then the flight (or transfer) between cities is also added to the cost. You can also search for such tickets on aggregator sites by choosing the "multi-route".
6. Make a route. If you want to go to a specific country, look for flights to neighboring ones. For example, you want to go to Denpasar (Bali), and tickets there are usually expensive. Check out flights to Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, and from there you can fly by low-cost airlines. Likewise in Europe - a Paris-Madrid or Madrid-Rome flight can cost from 1000 rubles, and even less for a promotion. However, this is not the case in Latin America, where air travel is very expensive.
7. Charter flights, usually "last minute". Some travel agencies that have not sold the vouchers, in the last days before departure, "discount" at least air tickets. Earlier, before the bankruptcy of large tour operators, there were much more offers. There is an exchange of such special offers. Also, "last minute" tickets with a departure from Helsinki at low prices can be found on Finnish travel sites.
8. Domestic flights in some countries are cheaper to buy with local currency. For example, in Argentina and especially in Venezuela, where the black dollar exchange rate operates, it is much cheaper to buy tickets on the spot for cash. But this does not apply to international flights.
