Booking Cheap Flights - #1 Tip To Get Cheap Flights
The travel hacking art of booking cheap flights is far easier than many think. Here is my #1 tip to get cheap flights every single time you travel, and if you follow this advice to a T, you will get cheap flights every time you book going forward.
![Booking Cheap Flights - #1 Tip To Get Cheap Flights](/content/images/size/w1200/2024/05/How-To-Always-Book-Cheap-Flights-Everytime.webp)
How To Find & Book Cheap Flights
If you go searching online, you will see a million different advice articles teaching people how find cheap flights, or tips and tricks on booking cheap flights. However, most of them aren't very helpful! We did a quick search, and the results shows pages and pages with the following as the top search results.
- "The Trick To Find Cheap Flights"
- "Travel Hacking: The Art Of Booking Cheap Airfare"
- "Tip & Tricks To Get Cheap Flights"
- "The Best Way To Get Cheap Airfare"
- "Download This Guide To Learn How To Save Money On Airfare"
Where should you begin?
These websites all will lead you to one or more websites promising to have the lowest price on flights, or provide you small tips and tricks on the best way to find cheap flights that you have seen and heard of a million times. Yet, here you are still searching for the best way to find these mythical flight deals with not much luck.
These websites all tell you to:
- Book during offseason to save money on flights
- Use flight booking websites like Skyscanner to see what destinations are the cheapest places to fly to.
- Use Google Explorer tab to find the cheapest destinations from a particular route.
- Use a VPN to get cheaper flight deals
- Incognito mode will help you save money on airfare
All of these things are correct, but they don't really do much as you are well aware of and most of you already knew about these tips or tricks and it hasn't lead to you saving money on airfare. It still requires you to constantly take action and feels like a never ending search and workload to try and get a good deal on flights.
We're going to tell you to ignore everything you have learned prior to landing on this page and that if you follow the advise of this article, you will turn this world into your personal playground and never again will you be at the mercy of whatever airlines and travel websites want to charge you.
You see, it's not a matter of what website or trick you know to find and book cheap flights, but rather it all comes down to "How you go about planning the destination and then your booking habits surrounding the destination" that will determine how much you pay for your flights.
So, let's dive into the art of how not only find, but actually book get cheap flights every time you want to travel.
It all comes down to doing these 3 things and changing how you go about planning your vacations. If you take this advice, it WILL revolutionize your vacation life!
You must:
- Stop picking where and when before the price.
This bad booking habit is not your fault, but rather is caused by us needing to request time off from work, and this must end.
We typically come up with a random set of dates to give our place of work, and we may or may not know where we are wanting to go during this time frame, but in our minds we needed to request time off from work so that we could begin to actually plan our vacation. If we can't get the time off, why even plan a vacation right? Well, this is a major issue in part of the trap. You will see this is the #1 thing we must first change and find a way around it in order to be able to to ensure that we are always booking a cheap flight.
If this is the 1st step you take, you are now locked into a certain set of dates and the best thing you can do at this point is to start trying to find destinations that are cheap that fall within this timeline.
The moment we fall into these bad planning habits, the only flexibility we have left is "where" we are going to go, and no long "When" we will go.
Follow these steps....
Then after you read the steps you will see how all of them tie together to not only ensure but to guarantee that you are not only finding, but booking cheap flights every single time you travel.
Step 1: For Always Booking Cheap Flights
- Create a big list of all the places you want to go. All of your "dream trip" destinations that have been on your mind.
- Now I want you to also add all the places you "would" also travel to if the flights cost to get there was 50%-75% cheaper than normal.
Step 2: For Always Booking Cheap Flights
- Sign up for cheap flight alerts from Jetsetter Alerts (Us) or a similar service. We send out alerts for “Airline Mistake Fare” aka Error Fares and Flash Sales Alerts from us.
Mistake fares are accidents or price glitches not meant to happen, and flash sales are deals that last 1-3 days typically and will be 40%-70% off the normal price for that flight. You can see some of our recent cheap flight alerts here, or see a few examples below.
Below are a few screen shots of random cheap flight alerts that have been sent out to our members. We don't post these online, because ever member has their alerts personalized and it just wouldn't be practical as they only last for a short period of time. Cheap flight alert are received via email.
Atlanta to Santiago Chile $63 Round Trip - Mistake Fare
New York JFK To Milan Italy $160 Round Trip - Mistake Fare
Chicago To Maui $316 Round Trip - Flash Sale
Denver To Sydney Australia $364 Round Trip - Mistake Fare
New Burgh NY to Berlin Germany $250 Round Trip - Flash Sale
Newark EWR Airport to Tokyo Narita Airport $334 - Mistake Fare
Here is how you can always take advantage when these cheap flight deals when they come & still be able to pre plan your vacations with work and your travel companions.
Step 3: For Always Booking Cheap Flights
![24 Hour Flight Cancellation Law](https://www.jetsetteralerts.com/content/images/2024/05/24-Hour-Flight-Cancellation-Law.webp)
👉 Always remember that you have 24 hours to cancel any flight for a full refund.
So many are unaware of this, but it is literally a law passed by congress and enforced by the department of transportation for any carrier who sells flights originating or traveling to the United States.
Make the 24 hour rule your best friend! Love this rule! It’s the 3rd and final piece of our cheap flight travel hacking puzzle!
When you get a cheap flight alert from us or whatever alert service you go with, if it's on your list of destinations, BOOK IT!
You do not wait!
You go ahead and book it because it's cheap, it's on your list of places you want to travel to, and you can cancel the flight for a 100% refund within the 1st 24 hours of booking it. You will learn more about this final step later on.
Once you have done this a few times and you have broken your bad bookings habits that have left you at the mercy of whatever the airlines want to charge you, then you can take it to the next level and do what I do.
When alerts come for places I want to go to, I book 3 different sets of dates for me and my GF. I then give her the dates and tell her to confirm the set of dates that works best for her and I then cancel the other 2 and it doesn’t cost me a penny. No questions asked, enforced by federal law. It does not matter if it's a US carrier or not, so long as the flight departs from or is going to the United States, as all carriers who wish to have access to the US market have agreed to these terms.
Without this law in place my travel life would not be what it is, because I would only be able to book 1 set of dates for us, and I would rarely be able to take advantage of the crazy cheap flight deals we find, because some flash sales that are huge discounts will only last 1 day sometimes.
However, because of the 24 hour flight cancellation law; I can lock in the price every single time an alert comes without any hesitation or even feel the need to communicate and organize first! Instead, we can book 1st and communicate and organize 2nd.
Because these prices can change anytime, you want to go ahead and book 1 or more sets of dates and secure the great price. Having several dates for the same alert booked just means you have even more opportunities for requested time off from work and your travel partners to go through.
Example: Pretend you get an alert for a flight to Paris for $250 round trip. You have a couple options.
- Wait to book and call your travel partner and family and get them all excited asking them what dates they want and they tell you, and then you come back to book and the tickets are now $1000 and you just bummed out yourself and everyone involved.
Or you could have
- Booked several dates the moment the alert came to guarantee you and your travel partners flights at the incredible price.
- Call them and say “I just booked a crazy deal to Paris, and these are the dates. Let me know if any of these dates work and that you can get off from work on those dates. If you can not confirm, don't worry about it as I will just go ahead and cancel and it not cost anything.
If you are retired, this will work every single time! But what if you are not retired?
If you are not retired and not self employed, you need to check with your employer. The good new is, most employers have the ability for you to check for time off simply by looking online or requesting with your boss.
If you are not retired, Just be 100% strait with your boss.
Tell your boss or manager “I Booked a great deal to Paris, and I did multiple reservations so I could check with you and see which of these weeks I could take off and go on vacation, however I only have 24 hours to confirm which dates I would like to keep and cancel the others".
It's really that simple!
If you follow these flight booking habits, you will change every aspect of your vacation life, and from this day forward you will have 0 issues finding and booking the cheapest airfare deals.
As you can see in this photo, it doesn’t matter if you book on a 3rd party site like Expedia or Priceline they refund must still be honored within the first 24 hours regardless of where you book it as long as the flight originates from or is returning to the US.
Once you have broken your bad booking habits and are now comfortable with your new vacation planning process, you can take it to the next level to ensure or greatly decrease the likelihood of you having to cancel and not get to go by the dates not working out for you.
I book 3 or 4 sets of dates for the exact same destination based on 1 cheap flight alert, and then cancel the dates that don't work out for us, and many times I have to cancel all of them.
But, the thing is that we're guaranteed dirt cheap flights around the world every year by using this process.