Find a Cheap Fare to SOMEWHERE

  Airfare Booking Strategies

When you are planning a trip, you probably know exactly where you want to go. However, sometimes you may be open to several possible destinations, depending on what type of deal you can get.

Several tools are designed to uncover well-priced airline tickets for your next trip, letting you easily browse airfares to many different destinations. These tools are the best way to find a great deal on airplane tickets and can provide inspiration for a trip to a fantastic destination.

"Explore" Maps

• Google’s Explore Map. Google Flights lets you view possible destinations on a map. You can view prices for specific dates; or for a weekend, one-week, or two-week trip in a given month or across the next six months. The prices displayed on the map are only approximates. You’ll need to click on individual cities to see the real fares. At least with Google Flights, this will be blazingly fast.

• Kayak’s Explore Map. Kayak / Momondo has a similar tool. It doesn't provide as much control over the parameters of your flights, but provides a convenient way to narrow down your options to certain types of destinations (e.g. city, beach, family).

Scanning through fare deals

Another approach to finding a good destination is to scan through recent “deals” that are posted on websites that focus on spreading the word about unusually low prices. These websites aren’t so much airfare searching tools as they are listings of airfare alerts. They are designed to provide notifications about new deals and just show a list of each deal in the reverse order of when they found them.

“All the Flight Deals” is the best site for browsing unusually low fare from your city. All the Flight Deals aggregates the low-priced deals from most of the other “flight deal” sites and presents them in easy-to-view listings. You can also set up email notifications with your preference of different destination regions or countries.

Taking advantage of Mistake Fares

• For quicker notifications about mistake fares, you’ll need to directly leverage some other sources. The main downside of All the Flight Deals is that you won’t necessarily learn about mistake fares immediately. You can set it up to send you an email with every new deal. But, with the large number of regular “low-priced” deals that are published across all the different sites, you’ll be inundated with emails.

There can also be a delay from the time a deal shows up on the original website and when it is picked up by All the Flight Deals. Under normal circumstances, this delay isn’t a big problem. However, in a mistake-fare situation, it can make the difference between catching or missing a deal.

If you want to focus on mistake fares, we suggest that you set up alerts with at least one of the following tools. Get Only the Notifications You Want, the Way You Want Them

• The Flight Deal.  One of the two best sources for mistake and other unusually inexpensive fares. Its deals should also show up on All the Flight Deals, but you could use our IFTTT notification trick to get instant notifications. Oddly, their service is split among two nearly identical sites, the Flight Deal covers New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle, and Washington DC. Fare Deal Alert covers Atlanta, Charlotte, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Orlando, and San Diego.
• Secret Flying. The other best source for deals. Like the Flight Deal, it is covered by All the Flight Deals, but you might want to set up instant notifications directly.
• Fly 4 Free. Another worthwhile site. Conveniently, it has already set up separate twitter feeds for a bunch of larger cities. This allows you to follow it directly in twitter. 

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Airfare 101: Find the Lowest Fares

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