If you are a frequent business traveler there are occasional opportunities to use some accumulated rewards to get discounts on a flight or even travel for free, but if you want to always pay less for your flights you need a more long-term ticket-buying strategy.
Here are some tips on how to consistently book airline tickets at the right price, including why booking early is not always a winning ploy, a way to get the best price even after booking a flight, plus a suggestion to change your flying habits for better prices.
Grabbing a bargain
The mentality of most ticket buyers is that you have to get in early if you are going to achieve the lowest possible price for your airline ticket.
When an airline has a sale and releases a certain amount of cheap flights there is often a mad scramble on their website to snag a bargain, with those that miss out on the deals cursing their luck for not acting sooner.
The reality is that you are more likely to make consistent savings over a period of time if you get into the habit of regularly checking prices to look for fluctuations rather than focusing on a specific period of time.
Many airlines have a policy of releasing discounted tickets at unspecified times before a flight, so you might find the price drops three weeks before for a few days before spiking again after.
If you set up email price alerts you can be notified of price changes directly to your inbox and act quickly to secure a deal using that time-critical information.
Change your mind
You can often need to change your plans at short notice and if you are staying somewhere like the Marriott College Park Hotel and Conference Center it isn’t normally much of a problem to amend your booking.
What many of us don’t think about is that you can also cancel or change your flight without incurring a charge. If that is the case with your airline, that means you can potentially cancel and rebook your flight without a penalty if you find the price has dropped shortly after you made the initial booking.
Times and dates matter
There are a couple of standard factors that can heavily influence the price you pay for your airline ticket.
If you can be flexible with your schedule and travel at any time of the day there is a good chance that you can find a cheaper flight leaving later in the day or any other time that isn’t considered to be peak period.
Airlines can have more trouble filling seats on midweek flights compare to Monday and Friday flights, so there are regular savings to be made if you can plan your week to take a flight on a Wednesday, which is widely regarded as one of the cheapest days to fly.
These are just a few ways you can play the system and once you build up an array of tricks and tactics you could soon be paying less than full fare for your flights almost every time you want to fly.