7 Hacks for Finding Cheap Flights After Hundreds of Trips

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People often tell us we’re “so lucky” to travel as much as we do. Or they assume we must spend an absolute fortune on it. Neither is true.

We’ve visited more than 450 cities across 50+ countries… so yes, we’ve booked a lot of flights. But one of the reasons we can travel so often is that we’ve got pretty good at avoiding throwing money away when we don’t have to.

And flights are one of the places where we REALLY hate spending money. We'd much rather spend it on a nice hotel, food, or an exciting experience.

Over the years, we’ve tried plenty of cheap flight tricks. Some made an actual difference, while others were a complete waste of time.

The biggest savings usually came when we stopped searching for flights the obvious way.

We let cheap fares influence where we go, check if another airline is selling the exact same seat for less, and sometimes split one expensive journey into separate flights.

These are the 7 hacks we keep coming back to when we want to find cheap flights, plus a few viral flight “tricks” that we don’t think are worth bothering with.

Hack #1: Let the price choose your destination

We use this hack at least once a year, usually when we're flexible about where we go next. Instead of picking a place and then hunting for flights, we flip it. We look for cheap flights first, then let the cheapest tickets decide where we go.

The feature is called “Explore” or “Everywhere”. Enter your home airport, leave the destination open, and you'll see the cheapest flight options ranked by price.

A collage of two mobile phone screens showing the "Everywhere" feature from Skyscanner, revealing the cheapest destinations to go to for a given date.

Three tools do it well:

Momondo (our favourite⭐) – It maps the cheapest destinations worldwide (or lists them, if you prefer), searches a whole date range, and filters by trip type like “city” or “beach”.
Google Flights – A great map too, but it needs your exact departure and return dates. You can't leave them open.
Skyscanner – Good trip-type filters and flexible travel dates, but no map, so you're scrolling a photo list instead.

It's how we've ended up in hidden gems like Ljubljana, Riga and Krakow, places we hadn’t really considered before.

A collage of two mobile phone screens showing the "Everywhere" feature from Momondo, revealing the cheapest destinations to go to for a given date, sorted by type of trip.

Hack #2: Grab error fares super fast

Some of the cheapest flights we've ever booked came from an airline's mistake. A currency bug, a technical glitch, or a simple typo can list a flight for a fraction of its cost, and airlines usually honour it.

So instead of refreshing airline websites for hours, you let a service track thousands of flights and alert you when good offer lands. And it's not just errors. Most of what they send is everyday sales at 40-60% off.

This is the most hands-off of all the hacks to find cheap flights on this list. There are plenty of providers that offer this service, like Thrifty Traveler, Jack's Flight Club and Daily Drop.

But the two we keep coming back to are Secret Flying and Going.

Two error fare examples from SecretFlying, one of the hacks to find cheap flights for planes.

Secret Flying is why we've flown business class for the price of economy a handful of times now, including London to Seoul for £300 return each (about US$405 or €350).

The very best business class fares now sit behind a Secret Flying subscription.

Is it worth paying for? For us, yes. One of those deals is worth 50x the yearly cost. But that's a call only you can make, and the free version still turns up economy fares worth grabbing (just no business class).

Going is our other go-to. Set your home airport and the deals come straight to you. The free tier is great for deals within the US, but international flights and mistake fares both need the paid subscription.

Friends of ours have flown transatlantic for literally US$10, at which point it's basically travelling for free.

Hack #3: Use price predictions to choose the best time to book

Sometimes you know exactly where you're going and exactly when, so letting a cheap fare pick the trip for you isn't an option.

That's where this one comes in. Even with fixed dates and a fixed destination, you can still pay less by booking at the right time.

Booking early feels like the responsible thing to do. But we've rushed to buy a fare, then watched it drop two weeks later.

Screenshot of a Hopper flight search that predicts when fares will be cheapest, showing that booking early is not always the lowest-priced option.

Airlines use dynamic pricing and tend to open high, drop the price, and then push it back up again. The trick is catching that dip, and a few tools predict it for you:

Hopper (our favourite⭐) – It gives the fullest picture by far. Rather than just buy-now-or-wait for lower fares, it forecasts when the price should drop, how low it might go, and when it'll climb back up, with a claimed 95% accuracy. The only catch is desktop showing US dollars, so we keep the app on our phones for GBP (£).
Google Flights – It flags if today's fare is low, typical or high against the last 60 days on that route. Useful, but only about right now, with no read on where the price is heading next.
Kayak – It names the single date it predicts will be cheapest. Handy to know, though it won't tell you how far prices move around it.

Hack #4: Set price alerts so you never miss a fare drop

A price alert is a free tool that watches your route in real-time and emails you the second the price changes.

If it's not the right time to book yet, we set one up and then forget about it until a notification pops up. It takes the guesswork out of chasing the cheapest flights.

A collage with screenshots from Kayak, Skyscanner and Google Flights that shows where to find the "Price alert" feature in each tool.

There are plenty of tools that do price tracking. Google Flights, Skyscanner and Hopper all work, but Kayak's alerts are our favourite visually. You can see one in the screenshot below a London alert we've set for a possible return to Singapore.

Examples of price alerts from Kayak and Google Flights, an easy flight hack to save money.

Google's price alert emails look a bit blunt in comparison. That's an example in the bottom right corner a trip to Florence we've got our eye on.

This hack is just too easy to set up to not do it.

Hack #5: Pay less for the same seat through a partner airline

To be honest, this hack still feels a bit crazy to us. You'd assume the airline flying the plane sells the cheapest seat on it. Turns out that's not how it always works (and figuring that out has saved us a fair bit).

Airlines in the same alliance share flights, and you can usually spot it when a flight on an airline website carries a small “operated by XYZ” note. That note is the giveaway.

One carrier is flying the plane, but the partner airline sells those exact same seats under its own flight numbers, sometimes at wildly different ticket prices.

A collage that shows an example of an Alaska Airlines-operated flight that is prices higher on the official website than on the website of the partner airline American Airlines, showing a saving of US$115.

Above is a real example from our research for this post. A domestic flight on Alaska Airlines came up at US$506 (about €440 or £375) on Alaska's own site.

We found the identical basic economy seat through their partner, American Airlines, for US$391 (about €340 or £290). Same plane, same seat, US$115 saved.

The catch is that you won't spot this if you always book straight on your favourite airline's website.

Our fix is to run the exact same flight through Google Flights or Skyscanner once we've found it, then click into it to see which partner airlines are selling it and for how much.

A screenshot of Google Flights that lists the different booking options for a given flight, which is how a cheaper partner airline price can be found. This is one of the lesser-known hacks to find cheap flights.

Yes, it's another 3 minutes of faffing about on a second website. But when that faffing hands you back US$115, you learn to love it.

Hack #6: Use flexible date tools to find the cheapest day to fly

When we know where we're going but we haven’t FULLY landed on the exact dates, this is the hack that we come back to. Shifting a departure by a day or two can unlock lower prices on the same route.

This hack helps when you already know your route and just want the cheapest day. Choosing the right tool depends on how flexible you are.

Small flexibility (± a few days)

Best when you've got a rough window with a few days of give either side.
A price matrix lays out every departure and return combination, so the cheapest pairing jumps out.
Shifting by even a day or two can knock a real chunk off the fare.
We use Momondo's flexible dates matrix.

A screenshot of Kayak's matrix that is the perfect tool to find the cheapest flights if you have small flexibility with the flight dates.

Medium flexibility (a whole month)

For when you've settled on the month but not the dates.
A monthly price calendar shows which days are cheapest across the whole month.
Skyscanner's monthly view is our go-to.

A screenshot of Skyscanner's monthly price charts that shows the cheapest dates within a month, which is a great tool to find the cheapest flights with medium date flexibilty.

Full flexibility (any dates)

For when nothing's fixed and you just want the cheapest option going.
A colour-coded calendar flags the pricey and cheap stretches at a glance, no reading individual prices.
Kayak does this well, as does Hopper.

A screenshot of Kayak's colour-coded calendar that shows the cheapest dates across entire dates, which is one of the many cheap flight tips.

This flexible date search is our answer whenever friends and family ask how to get cheap flights on a route they've already settled on. Using this hack, we found super cheap in-between season flights to Barcelona and Prague last year.

Hack #7: Always add your bags before comparing flight prices

It's a small hack, but we still see people fall for it when they could have booked a full-service carrier instead.

Budget airlines like Ryanair and Frontier are famous for dangling a low fare, then piling on fees for a carry-on and a seat. By the end, the “cheap” flight often isn't.

So we never compare prices without a carry-on added in. Google Flights and Skyscanner both have a baggage filter for exactly this. Flip it on and the real price shows up front, usually reshuffling the results entirely.

A collage showing two screenshots of Google Flights, one without the bag fees and one with the bag fee filter.

The other side of this is one of the oldest tricks to finding cheap flights: just pack less. The less you take, the less you tend to pay.

Common flight booking myths that aren't actually true

Some of the most repeated tips for finding the cheapest flights are ones we'd quietly ignore.

Here are three that get shared constantly and still don't hold up:

The Tuesday booking myth – You've probably heard fares are cheapest if you book at midnight on a Tuesday. Google's latest travel pricing analysis puts that to bed. The day you buy barely moves the price at all. Tuesday is technically the cheapest on average, but only by about 1.3% versus the most expensive one, which is nothing next to any hack on this list. The day you fly is a different story, though. Monday to Wednesday runs around 13% cheaper than weekend flights.

The incognito mode myth – Plenty of travellers swear that searching in a private browser stops airlines tracking their interest and raising the fare. But there's no good evidence that repeatedly searching for a flight makes airlines increase the price specifically for you. In a Consumer Reports test, prices were exactly the same in normal and incognito browsers 88% of the time. Research into airline pricing algorithms has also found that individual search behaviour doesn't affect fares. So while flight prices can change frequently, switching to incognito mode isn't a reliable way to get a cheaper ticket.

Chrome Incognito window illustrating the cheap flight hack myth that private browsing helps travellers find lower airfares.

The VPN booking myth – You've probably seen the trick on TikTok: switch your VPN to another country and supposedly the same flight suddenly gets cheaper. There's a grain of truth behind it, because airlines and booking sites can offer different fares in different markets. But changing your IP address isn't a reliable way to access a cheaper fare. Tests comparing the same flights from different VPN locations have found inconsistent results. In one test, the biggest actual saving was just US$9 (about €8 or £7). So unless you already use a VPN and want to experiment, there are much more reliable ways to find a cheap flight.

Ready to book something cheap?

Honestly, we don't have a favourite hack on this list. Each one solves a different problem, so the right one really depends on where you are in your planning. But every single one of them has saved us proper money. Across hundreds of trips, it adds up to several thousand pounds, if not more.

Some other things worth reading before you fly:

If you're already booked and dreading the long haul, our tricks for surviving long flights in economy will make the flight itself far less painful.
And if you're flying somewhere with a big time difference, our approach to beating jet lag will save your first day at the destination.

Whichever tips to find cheapest flights you take with you, we hope your next fare is your best one yet.

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