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  Airfare Booking Strategies

Moving your flights just a few days, in either direction, can make a big difference in the price that you’ll pay. Switching your entire trip by a few weeks, in either direction, can have an even bigger impact.

Remember that none of the flight booking tools will search Southwest, or some other discount airlines. You’ll need to check those as well, if you want to make sure you are evaluating all the good options.

Google Flights is often the best option for searching multiple dates

Google Flights does an exceptional job of helping you compare flights on different days. The only thing that keeps it from being the “perfect” flight searching tool is that, particularly overseas, it won’t include all the possible airlines and flight options. While Google makes the process of finding flights as easy as possible, you might miss out on a less-expensive option than you could have found on Momondo, Skyscanner, or even Kayak

• See the lowest prices for every day at a glance.  When you click on the date box, you’ll see a calendar that shows prices for every day. Lower prices are highlighted in green. You can see at a glance which days have the lowest possible price.


You can also view the daily low prices as a graph, by pressing on the "Price Graph" button.


• Quickly view the options for each day. Of course, the cheapest flight for any day may not be a particularly good option. You want to compare convenience, as well as price. You are looking for the lowest-priced “reasonable” flight, not the lowest possible price. That means checking the actual options for each individual day. Because Google Flights is so much faster than other booking tools, it is easy to quickly view several different days. Once you are looking at the options for any given day, you only need to press the little arrows in the date box , to shift a day in either direction.

• Broaden the list of airports you are searching. Most flight booking tools make it easy to search all the airports that serve a particular city, like New York, but Google also makes it easy to search all the airports in an entire region. Just click on the "Airports" tile to see a list of all the airports in the area, along with the lowest fare available from each airport. Then you can choose up to 5 airports to use for each of your searches.

Other Options

• Momondo and Kayak will search for several different days at a time. While it is convenient to search up to a week at a time, getting results takes much longer than on Google.


Once you search, you’ll see a convenient summary of fares on different days and can check or un-check options to narrow down the listings.



Beware of Momondo’s price graph that tries to help you find the lowest available prices. It shows estimated prices and is too inaccurate to be worthwhile.

• Skyscanner is the other good site at finding fares on lesser-known international low-cost carriers. Unfortunately, you can only search one day at a time. 

Airfare 101: Find the Lowest Fares

Step-by-Step Guide to Buying Airplane Tickets

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