Booking flights smartly and cost effectively is incredibly similar to looking for accommodation abroad.
Firstly, to avoid websites collecting your browsing data to dynamically set pricing on frequently viewed flights or destinations, go incognito on your browser.
You can also use a keyboard shortcut to open an Incognito window:
Windows, Linux, or Chrome OS: Press Ctrl + Shift + n.
Mac: Press ⌘ + Shift + n.
Once done, there are a number of meta-search sites you can use to determine the best pricing for an airline.
One of the most popular of these engines is SkyScanner.
SkyScanner is an all in one travel site and app that allows you to search for flights, hotels and cars all in one place.
For flights, data is collected via many API methods via different airlines which is aggregated, and then displayed on their website based on best and most cost efficient ranking. When a user performs a search for a specific destination or flight path, SkyScanners’ platform will perform many asynchronous searches and will select the best option based on service company/airline, time/date and price based on criteria set by the user.
Despite being amongst the most popular, I found that SkyScanner didn’t provide the best pricing for domestic flights within the US.
I also ran concurrent searches in multiple tabs using other metasearch sites like CheapoAir, CheapAir and ITA Matrix, a no frills search engine. Once I compared pricing amongst the results to determine the least cost priced flight on the date we wanted to fly out of Honolulu to Los Angeles on SkyScanner, I looked at the other tabs to confirm that this was indeed, the best priced flight.
Hawaiian Airlines had the cheapest flights at around $260 NZD ($186 USD) per person, out of all the SkyScanner aggregated results. Out of interest, I browsed directly to the Hawaiian Airlines website and input my search criteria there…and what would you know! The flights were marginally cheaper at $234.50 NZD ($167.70 USD).
This was only the first flight of five that I needed to book, but I felt like I was on a roll!
Whilst I am a penny pincher and like to save money and cut costs where I can, I did have one criteria that was super important…where possible, flights must be direct. I couldn’t stand the idea of spending precious vacation time in bustling airports. In my work as an event manager and former life as an account manager, I’ve travelled many times up and down the islands of New Zealand and have been a lemming in an airport long enough to know that I’m not hugely fond of them. The thought of having to take my shoes off, empty my pockets, be swabbed for explosives, have a metal detection wand waived over my unmentionables, try to look like a 2 year old picture of myself when being scrutinised by officials through customs, make it to the gate on time, make sure my luggage is underweight…it’s enough to induce a long and somewhat painful panic attack.
Once when travelling to Auckland from Melbourne airport, I found a couple of Australian dollars in my coat pocket. Not wanting to take local currency home with me, I absentmindedly purchased a bottle of Coca-Cola from a vending machine near check in before reporting to customs. After going through the metal detector at the end of the conveyor belt setup to X-ray baggage, a customs officer approached me holding my bag near his face, eyeing it closely.
“Is this your bag?”
Indeed, it was my bag with the offending coke bottle inside. He spent the next 10 minutes scolding me on why liquids over and above the permitted 100mls was not okay to bring through customs and promptly threw my untouched beverage in the nearest yellow biohazard bin. See? Stressful.
So, you can expect to pay a little more when looking at direct flights, but I feel like the benefits outweigh the downside of spending an extra $100 or so.
When booking flights out of Nebraska to New Orleans unfortunately there were no direct flight options, but Alaska Air offered some of the most competitively priced options, albeit with two, sometimes three transits stops in the middle bringing the total trip time to over 20 hours. Yuck, no thank you.
In the end, we elected to fly with Delta Airlines whose flight paths including stops in either Fort Worth or Atlanta. The shortest connection was via Texas, so we chose this option with it being only $40 USD more expensive per person than the Alaskan +20hr flight.
In all, we managed to book six flights for two adults and a child from Honolulu to LA, LA to Nebraska, Nebraska to New Orleans (via Fort Worth), New Orleans to LaGuardia, NY and JFK NY back to Honolulu for the paltry sum of $5,999.55 NZD ($4,290.66 USD), coming in under our set budget of $6,000 NZD by $0.45.
I do love a good challenge!
Charli x
charliespinoza.com 