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Depending on where you live, it can be hard to find less expensive international flights from your home airport. Online booking tools often won't be able to show tickets that take advantage of cheap international flights from other cities, particularly on airlines that aren't part of the big alliances.
To take advantage of cheap international flights, you may need to buy a separate ticket to another departure city and/or a ticket from an international hub to your final destination. It can be inconvenient and time-consuming to purchase separate tickets, but it can frequently save you a lot of money.
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Opportunities to save money
Traditional airfare searching tools will check most of your routing options, especially if you search for each direction as a separate one-way flight. But even the best tools don't search every option.
- In the most common scenario, you can make your own way to a "gateway" city. For international flights, fares from some cities can be much less expensive than fares from other cities. Since the cheapest international flights are often with airlines that don't have any domestic partnerships, you won't find these fares when you do a normal search. To get a less expensive overall fare, you’ll need to book two separate flights—a domestic flight to the "gateway" city and an inexpensive international flight from there.
- Make your own way from a foreign hub to your destination. Even if you are leaving from a low-cost gateway city, you won’t always be able to find a cheap flight that goes directly to your eventual destination. Sometimes, the airline that offers the best international flights doesn’t have partners that connect to the city where you want to go. Fortunately, most of the world is now served by low-cost regional airlines. If you can find an affordable flight to the region you are traveling to, you can combine it with a separate flight to your final destination.
- For an international trip, you might wind up buying as many as three separate round trip tickets. In the worst case scenario, you won’t be able to find well-priced tickets from your home airport to the region of the world you are travelling to and you won’t be able to find well-priced tickets from any convenient US gateway city all the way to your eventual destination. In that case, you’ll need to piece together three separate tickets—a “positioning flight” to a good international gateway, the “long haul” flight to the general proximity of where you want to fly, and a “final leg” to your desired destination.
- You can sometimes save money by making your own connection, even on domestic flights. For example, rather than booking a more expensive flight from Seattle to Nashville, you may be able to save money by booking a ticket between Seattle and Denver and then a separate trip between Denver and Nashville. Because flights are priced as one-ways, you might do this in one direction and book a regular reservation in the other direction. This strategy mostly works when prices to your final destination are more expensive than normal.
- Making a stopover, rather than a quick connection, can sometimes help. Rather than making a regular connection at an airport in the middle of your route, you might be able to find a lower fare by connecting to a flight that leaves the next day or the day after. And you get the potential side-benefit of visiting an added destination.
For example, rather than trying to book directly from Salt Lake City to Europe, you’d book a "positioning flight" from Salt Lake City to San Francisco, New York, Chicago, or Dallas; and then book a cheap flight to Europe from one of those cities. If you tried booking the full trip, the booking engine probably wouldn't check the potentially low-cost combination of flights on Delta and Norwegian Airlines.
This same strategy can also be used when you are traveling to Asia, South America, or other international destinations, although the gateway cities will often differ.
For example, instead of buying expensive tickets to Vietnam, you can buy a more affordable flight to Hong Kong and then book separate low-cost tickets to Vietnam from there. Or instead of buying expensive tickets to Prague, you can buy more affordable tickets to Oslo or Barcelona and then book separate tickets for the final part of the journey.
For example, you might not be able to find a well-priced ticket that goes all the way to your destination on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. But you might be able to find a cheap ticket to the connecting city on Friday and another cheap ticket between the connecting city and your final destination on Sunday, lowering the cost of your overall trip.
Having some extra time in the connecting city, reduces the chances that you'll have any problems caused by making making an "unofficial" connection.
Potential downsides
Make-your-own connection trips can be problematic. There are several significant drawbacks to piecing together your own trip using separate flights:
- You often can't check your luggage all the way through. If you need to check your bags, you’ll need to pick them up at baggage claim at the connecting airport, re-check them and go back through security. This means a lot of extra time at the connecting airport. Carrying-on your luggage makes these combined ticket strategies much more efficient.
- With international connections, you may need to go back and forth through immigration. If you can't check-in and get your boarding pass, you'll need clear immigration, make your way to departures side of the airport, check-in, and then go through emigration. This can be really time consuming and you may need to pay some entry or exit taxes.
- It can be a big problem if you get delayed and miss your flight. When you combine flights on a single reservation and you can’t make your connection, the airline will make every effort to rebook you. But if you book a separate reservation, they aren’t obligated to help. Neither airline might take responsibility for the missed connection. Many times, the airline whose flight you missed will try to accommodate you. However, if they don’t, you might be on the hook for a new, very expensive flight to your destination
- If you need to change or cancel your flight, you’ll need to pay separate fees. With a single reservation, you’ll be charged a single change or cancellation fee. With separately booked tickets, you’ll need to pay each airline separately.
Finding inexpensive long-haul flights
When you are flying internationally, the key flight is the one that gets you across the ocean.
Due to arrival of new discount airlines, transoceanic flights to Europe have dropped significantly in price. Prices to Asia have dropped due to increased competition from expanding Chinese airlines. Not only do the flights on these new airlines cost much less than what was common a few years ago, they have forced down the prices from more traditional airlines.
While it is always considerably better to fly directly to where you want to go, don’t be overly concerned whether a discount airline offers tickets directly to the specific city you want to visit in Europe or Asia. Once you’ve found a good price to get you across the ocean, you can often tack-on additional low-priced tickets as necessary.
There are three general approaches for finding good options. You might want to use more than one.
1. Using Skyscanner to find the cheapest options to a specific destination
Skyscanner is the only tool we’ve found that lets you search for all the flights to a destination, such as all the flights TO Paris. All the other generally useful tools, such as Google Flights, Kayak, etc., only search for all the flights from an airport, such as all the flights FROM New York.
Just enter “United States” (or “Canada”) in the From box and your destination in the To box and you’ll see the lowest fares from a variety of gateway cities. If you are building up a trip segment-by-segment, you'll usually want to use the checkbox to filter to the non-stop options.
