5 Secret Tips for Finding Travel Deals

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Want to plan an amazing vacation without paying full price? Follow these easy tips to score flights, hotels, and more at rock-bottom rates. 

Monitor Prices

If you want to book a flight or hotel yourself, monitoring the price can help you determine if what you’re seeing is really a deal or not. Have you ever walked into a place to buy something to find it conveniently on sale? Businesses are always running a “sale,” but is that sale really a good deal? The only way to know if you’re getting a good deal is to know your prices. Keep an eye on the average price of hotels and flights to help you realize when costs drop.

Flexible With Your Dates and Destination? Use the Explore Function in Google Flights, Skyscanner, or Momondo

When you’re looking for somewhere to go and just want a deal, you can use the explore function on Google Flights, Skyscanner, or Momondo to find the best prices on airfare. You can search with no destination in mind, or narrow it down to a region like Europe. 

If you can be a little flexible with the time you take your vacation, you’ll be rewarded with very low fares and prices for the travel you want to do. Prices vary widely from day to day and the flexible search on Google Flights allows you to see which days are the cheapest to fly. To use this tool, simply leave the date fields blank after selecting a destination (or leave the destination blank for even more versatility). The search will default to a 1-week trip any time in the next six months. Momondo and Skycanner have similar functions, letting you search for trips within a given month or range of months.

Just be sure the routing you pick works for your schedule and use filters to narrow down your trip based on number of stops, arrival time, or departure time. There’s nothing worse than buying a $300 ticket to Paris that requires multiple transfers and 27 hours of travel time. 

Sign Up for Marketing Materials From Your Favorite Travel Companies

Your favorite travel brands love to advertise to you. Every now and then, they’ll send incredible deals for their email list subscribers. These are different from the run-of-the-mill “We’re having a sale!” emails. You’ll get those, too. But if you’re checking prices to your desired destination often, you’ll know when a sale is much, much better than normal. 

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This is how I booked two tickets to Tahiti for a great price. I clicked on an email from United Airlines advertising a fare sale using points. I tried some dates and destinations, and found an incredible points sale to Tahiti at about 40% off. I booked it immediately, knowing I could cancel within 24 hours without penalty. We ended up taking that vacation and saved a lot of money in the process. It never hurts to check prices when you receive those marketing emails!

Getting these promotions is easy. If you love the airline Southwest, for example, you would want to sign up for their email list from a button on their website. When you’re on the email list, you get the information about a sale first. Southwest recently had a 40% off sale and you would know about it sooner than everyone else if you were on their email list. 

Set Fare Alerts

If you’re looking at a particular destination and a specific time, toggling on Google Flights handy track price button is the way to go. If you’re signed into your Google account, you can get these fare alerts automatically when you do this. When the price changes significantly (either up or down), you’ll get an email from Google about the change in price. A flight to Italy I was looking at started around $800. I set my Google alert and got an email when the price dropped to $307. 

You can also sign up to be alerted to the best prices on routes of interest at SmarterTravel’s sister site Airfarewatchdog, which sends out low fare email alerts to subscribers.

Let Someone Else Find the Deals for You

There are countless services that work to find deals for you. They eliminate the need to sit at your computer and see if that email you received has really good deals or is just another marketing tactic you need to wade through. 

Some examples include:

• Travelzoo, an aggregator of travel deals with stellar prices
• NextVacay and Scott’s Cheap Flights, which send out fare drop alerts similar to those listed above
• Facebook groups focused on travel
• Online travel agencies, such as Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Cheap Caribbean, Kayak, or Funjet Vacation. 
• Warehouse travel agencies, such as Costco or Sam’s Club
• Travel agents

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