Mega-instructions on how to find and buy plane tickets for the cheapest price! 11 tricks that will help you significantly reduce the price of air tickets.

  • How to learn how to search and book tickets correctly?
  • How to take full advantage of all the opportunities provided by airlines and ticket search engines?
  • How to break the system and force airlines and agents to turn their clever tricks against themselves?
  • How to deal a crushing blow to the Airline Empire, recognize the Force and use it for the benefit of free travel?
  • How the hell can you finally learn to travel a lot and cheaply?

The answers are in this article!

Reading articles and news from the site, you have repeatedly noticed a number of ways to buy air tickets at the lowest price, sometimes at an indecently low price! In this article, I will systematize all the knowledge and skills of searching and buying cheap plane tickets and briefly cover them in 11 points. I love to travel, fly on planes and always try to do it cheaply or even for free. I have accumulated enough knowledge and skills - now I share everything I know here.

I will list ways to purchase cheap tickets in increasing order of their coolness and non-triviality. Let's start with basic knowledge , which any independent traveler should have, and gradually we will come to advanced skills and the most cunning ways to reduce the price of air tickets, which will be useful to know even for an experienced traveler.

The article is long (what can you do, there is a lot of advice), so be patient - who knows, maybe it will change your life, significantly increasing the time you will spend flying and traveling.

Go!

Tinkoff Bank promotion. Get an All Airlines card and get 6000 miles for the purchase of any air ticket as a gift. This is a profitable offer; this is only the second time in its history that the bank has carried out such a campaign. The promotion lasts only until April 28, 2019. Hurry up. As a bonus to the card, you receive free annual insurance and 10% cashback on hotel bookings on Booking.com.

How to Find Cheap Flights: The Basics

1. Use the capabilities of search engines 100%

Search engines for cheap air tickets (aggregators) are the easiest and most reliable way to find tickets at the lowest price. The essence of their work is to compare ticket prices for your desired destination among hundreds of airlines and all major agencies and find the best offer.

If you are looking for tickets exclusively on airline websites or, God forbid, typing queries into Yandex or Google like “buy cheap Aeroflot tickets” (I checked, many people do this), or don’t buy tickets online at all, but go to the ladies in ticket offices, then the cheapest plane tickets will always bypass you. With this approach, you simply have no chance of meeting them.

I consider three services to be the best search engines: Aviasales, Buruki and Skyscanner. Using them when searching for cheap air tickets is about 80-90% of success. However, to get the full benefit from search engines, you need to use their capabilities 100% - and not everyone does this: even travelers who are well familiar with them are not aware of a number of excellent functions of these aggregators.

Advice: Before you buy plane tickets, check the price in all three search engines for greater reliability - this will increase your chances of finding the cheapest plane tickets. Sometimes the price difference can be about 2-7% of the ticket price.

Well, now about the useful functions of search engines for cheap air tickets that you need to know and put into practice.

(photo © jrpboo / flickr.com)

A. Advanced (non-specific) search for cheap flights

The Skyscanner search engine has this amazing feature - it will solve the problem of anyone who does not have specific plans for where and when to fly, but wants to do it as cheaply as possible. Just right in a crisis! So, in the ticket search form you can enter not only specific cities/airports and clearly fixed dates, but also undefined options.

  1. In the column "Where" you can indicate the entire country (all its airports) - for example, write “Russia”, “Ukraine”, “Belarus” or, say, “Zimbabwe”. Plus, you can check the “Add nearby airports” checkbox.
  2. In the column "Where" You can enter “Everywhere” or leave the field empty, then the search system will look for the cheapest flight options to all countries of the world.
  3. In the fields departure and return dates You can specify “All month” or “All year” at once.

Here's an example of how to fill out a search form on Skyscanner:

E. Cheap flights for the holidays

Selections of plane tickets at the best prices can be seen on the Buruki service on the page "Fly away for the holidays!".

Select your city and the holidays for which you are looking for tickets (for example, May or New Year), and the system will give you a list of the best offers for these dates. You can sort the results by directions (Europe, Asia, America, etc.). A very convenient thing for planning a vacation!

And "interesting offers" they are not always - most often it is just a marketing ploy to attract attention with calls to buy air tickets as soon as possible. Sifting the wheat from the chaff in this area is not easy work, requiring a clear understanding of what ticket price is considered regular and what is promotional.

This is what we do here - only information worthy of attention appears, and everything dubious and false is eliminated. So stay tuned for our news! The easiest way to do this is by subscribing to ours - announcements of the latest news appear there instantly, and sometimes I publish some news about the availability of cheap tickets only there (when I don’t have time to write about it here on the site).

(Photo © Rennett Stowe / flickr.com)

3. Wait for the right moment

You can only buy the cheapest air tickets at certain times; for weeks on end throughout the year, the minimum prices will never hold. Therefore, always adhere to the rule - as soon as there is a chance to purchase cheap tickets, you need to take advantage of it. As soon as you read the news about a sale or find an attractive option on search engines, don’t hesitate - buy.

You also need to know the periods when plane tickets can be bought cheapest:

  1. one year before the planned trip;
  2. 2-3 months before departure;
  3. a few days before departure.

Of course, the rule is not ironclad - it is rather a trend. Keep in mind that relying on the latter option is always risky.

4. Buy an air ticket departing from a neighboring city

If you live in St. Petersburg, check prices for flights from Moscow and Helsinki; if you live in Perm or Chelyabinsk, ask if it is possible to buy cheap plane tickets departing from Yekaterinburg, and so on. Sometimes this can save tens of thousands of rubles. For example, when you see news like ““, you don’t need to hope that a good wizard will please the residents of Perm, Tyumen and the entire Ural region with similar prices, you just need to take and book such incredibly cheap tickets while you have the chance.

Residents of Moscow should not yawn either. Yes, 80-90% of all promotions and interesting offers from airlines are relevant only for flights from the capital, but this does not mean that you need to forget about the remaining 10%. It makes sense to check if there is anything interesting for flights from Pulkovo.

(photo © sewyerown / flickr.com)

5. Low-cost airlines

You can read about what low-cost airlines are in, and specifically about low-cost carriers in Europe - in.

Using low-cost opportunities wisely means:

  1. Fly from cities closest to us in Europe: Vilnius, Kaunas, Riga, Tallinn, Helsinki, Lappeenranta, Tampere. From the airports of these cities you can fly for 10-30 euros to almost any point in Europe, and also extremely cheaply - to Israel, Georgia, Morocco, the Canary and Azores Islands and more. Read more about this in the article about.
  2. Don’t forget that some discount airlines also fly to Russia: for example, from Moscow you can inexpensively fly to Budapest on board Wizz Air or fly to London on EasyJet. From both of these cities you can also fly cheaply to anywhere in Europe.
  3. Come up with ideas based on which destinations low-cost airlines offer especially low prices. Have you planned to go to Barcelona and suddenly found out that from there you can fly to Malta for 28 euros (1880 rubles), and from there to Milan for 10 euros (650 rubles)? So why not put together a route for an intense and very budget trip from such pieces (). It's simple and fun!
  4. Refuse luggage, because most budget airlines charge for its transportation separately. Sometimes you can buy very cheap tickets (for €10, for example), but pay three times as much for luggage. Travel light - it's cheaper and easier.

(photo © cheelah / flickr.com)

6. Fly with a group

Some airlines are ready to give discounts to passengers if they fly with a group and book tickets for several people at once.

For example, the low-cost airline EasyJet usually gives a discount when tickets are booked for two or three people: the discount can be 7-10 euros for each ticket. Wizz Air has a loyalty program - Wizz Discount Club. By purchasing a membership (€30 for two, €50 for up to 5 people), you can purchase any tickets for at least €10 cheaper throughout the year (that is, the membership pays for itself immediately).

You can even fly with imaginary friends - they can also help you buy plane tickets at a good discount. More on this below, in the section on advanced skills for knocking down airfare prices. And in general, the most interesting things are ahead!

Advanced skills for buying cheap airline tickets

7. Fictional baby

It’s interesting that sometimes you can simply invent a “friend” for yourself and get free discounts on your air tickets. Our imaginary friend must be a baby (children under 2 years old usually do not have to pay for a ticket). When searching for plane tickets, if you add a baby as a passenger, a discount will be applied to your ticket - sometimes quite significant. This trick does not always work - it all depends on the agent selling the ticket, the airline and the search engine. As far as I know, the trick so far only works on Aviasales (most often for Transaero tickets).

I have already written more than once about using this cunning way to buy air tickets cheaper than the original price (the price is indicated for round-trip tickets):

  • Tickets from Moscow to St. Petersburg or vice versa for 1,408 rubles. instead of 2670 ().
  • To Georgia from St. Petersburg for 4904 rubles. instead of 6200 ().
  • To Vilnius from Moscow for 3952 rubles. instead of 4508().

Of course, no babies will fly with you - when checking in for the flight, just come up with a good reason why the baby did not fly (he got sick, stayed with one of his relatives, etc.).

(photo © demandaj / flickr.com)

8. Tricky deceptive zigzag

Airlines love to make money on direct flights, because many are willing to overpay (sometimes a lot) for convenience, speed and the absence of tedious connections. Well, let's think of workarounds and force the airlines to sell us the cheapest tickets.

All you need to do is pretend. Pretend that we want to fly to places other than where we really want to go. Are you going to Tallinn? Don’t rush to look for air tickets for flights to this city, let’s better pretend that we need to go to Oslo. See for yourself, the best offer for tickets to the Estonian capital is 5,430 rubles on a direct flight with Estonian Air.

(Photo © benjaminlansky / flickr.com)

9. Complex (multipart) air flights

Sometimes you can buy significantly cheaper plane tickets if you build an extra segment into your flight route (use it whether you want to or not).

Cases from practice:

  • For example, the Etihad airline has repeatedly had an interesting incident with the pricing of tickets to Asia, if the route is formed as follows: “Moscow - Asia - Yekaterinburg”. At the same time, it was not necessary to fly to Yekaterinburg on the way back - the flight was carried out through Moscow and you could get off there. The savings amounted to about 3-5 thousand rubles. Here's the news about it.
  • I once wrote () about the great opportunity to fly for 29 thousand rubles to Dublin, the Seychelles, Mauritius and Paris in one trip. Just a dream for insatiable travelers for whom one or even two countries are not enough for one trip!

Such incidents happen precisely in multi-part routes on joint flights of several airlines at once due to the fact that the price calculation system is imperfect and in some atypical cases fails.

Bonus of this option: the opportunity to visit not one, but two or three cities in one trip and save money at the same time.

Unfortunately, finding such loopholes and glitches is not so easy. If such opportunities appear, I write news about them - keep an eye out. However, you can try your luck yourself, try to build difficult route (you can do this on Aviasales and Skyscanner) by including several flights to different cities in one form.

10. Wrong tariffs

As mentioned above, any price calculation system is imperfect and sometimes fails - this happens most often with complex flight routes, but sometimes it also happens with simple ones.

The rule here is simple: If you find incredibly cheap air tickets (for example), don’t think for a second - take it. No need to call your brother/matchmaker/wife/friend - if everything works out, they will approve the initiative. You should not (under any circumstances) call the airline or agency asking why the price is so low. An erroneous fare is erroneous because no one knows about it, and as soon as the fact of its existence is noticed by airline ticket sellers, they will immediately close up shop.

Yes, you need to be prepared for the fact that a ticket that was mistakenly sold at an excessively low price may be canceled by the airline. In this case, you will simply get your money back - every penny. So this is the worst case scenario - what we had was what we were left with. But another outcome is also possible - the tickets will be confirmed, your trip will take place, and you will save a hell of a lot.

(photo © caribb / flickr.com)

11. Free air tickets from Tinkoff Bank

Three years ago I finally decided to order the famous Tinkoff Bank All Airlines credit card, which sharpened especially for travelers. The card and bank exceeded all my expectations!

Current Tinkoff Bank promotions: 6,000 miles as a gift to all new clients or a year of free service.

(photo © mrmorodo / flickr.com)

+Additionally: not with a single ticket...

Yes, you won’t be satisfied with cheap air tickets alone - having bought them, you also need to resolve the issue of hotels, car rental, etc. Here I will list the most convenient and reliable services that solve these additional problems.

Travel accommodation

Look for hotels at the best price for your travel on the popular Roomguru service - it compares the prices of a variety of booking systems and finds the best one. Read more about how to save when booking hotels.

Sometimes it’s cheaper and more comfortable to rent a house or apartment - many interesting options from hosts can be found on the popular Airbnb service. By the way, this is definitely beneficial if you are traveling with your family or company.

Cheap tours

Car rent

You can rent a car using Skyscanner Car Hire online services (car rental worldwide).