Last updated on April 22nd, 2018
Gone are the days of individuals travelling abroad every few years (I know, some people never leave their country).
The wanderlust is real. People want to travel often – within the same year – to exotic archipelagos, foodie cities, and glacier regions.
But the cost of travel isn’t always cheap, especially when it comes to flights. I’ll give you my tips on how to find cheap international flights.
The 3 Golden Rules on How to Find Cheap International Flights
- Be flexible with your travel dates. I know, it’s not easy to do when you have children or a full-time job with limited vacation. But if they can manage, so can you.
- Be open-minded with your destinations. Maybe a one-week holiday in Paris can wait because you can travel around Thailand for a month at the same price. Plus, you’re a traveller: you want to see the world.
- Use a flight search engine and comparison site.
The first 2 rules are self-explanatory – I hope.
I’m going to elaborate on how to find cheap international flights using a flight search engine and comparison site. A few of these sites are Skyscanner, Momondo, and Google Flights.
I prefer Skyscanner because of their country to everywhere search feature. A backpacker also recommended it to me before I knew anything about open-ended destinations and travel dates. It’s also the website most of my nomadic friends use.
Why exactly Skyscanner?
They’re a flight search engine and comparison site which allows travellers to find cheap flights with several online travel booking agencies using a few variables. These variables include searching for flights from country to country (rather than airport to airport) and departure dates ranging up to a year (rather than the plus or minus three-day norm).
Skyscanner also shows results of budget airlines. For example, I travel to Colombia often and their budget airline is VivaColombia. Unfortunately, VivaColombia is not on major flight search engines such as Expedia.
Another reason Skyscanner is good at finding cheap international flights is because they don’t use cookies for dynamic pricing to increase profits.
The best way to use Skyscanner is to be flexible with your destination and travel dates as pointed out in rules 1 and 2 above.
Destinations are limitless and wanderlust has no set dates.
How to Use Skyscanner to Find Cheap International Flights
- Go to Skyscanner’s homepage.
- Select your departure city (preferably choose the whole country).
- Select your destination country or choose everywhere.
- Choose the departure and return months or use cheapest month to search the next 12 months.
- Skyscanner will return the cheapest international flights from your city or country to practically everywhere.
- Reserve your preferred flight through the listed travel agency site.
Of course, you can search for one-way flights and mix up the variables including inexpensive flight searches within a country. The key is to be flexible, if possible.
Download the Skyscanner App.
Long-term and budget travellers understand the importance of being flexible. That’s when Skyscanner can help find cheap flights to Europe, Asia, South America, and pretty much the entire globe.
You also don’t have to book your flight through the listed travel agency site from Skyscanner. If you have a preferred online travel agency, they may have the same flight itinerary and price, so you can look it up, and reserve; or book directly with the airline. The idea is to use Skyscanner to find the cheapest flights.
There is one downside of using Skyscanner. Since they have to search thousands of flight combinations with many travel agencies and airlines, its prices aren’t always in real-time. Sometimes the prices aren’t always up-to-date, but most times they are correct.
What do you think? Do you use Skyscanner to find cheap flights or do you have other methods?
Great write up – Ryan air are cheap with hand luggage and it’s about £15 each way for a hold bag