tracks when they want to travel. They hear “Carnaval in Rio” and immediately think it’s going to cost an arm and a leg.
Airfare can actually be one of the cheapest and most straightforward parts of your trip. You just have to know the tricks of the trade.
This is a big topic, but it’s also possibly the most important topic. Finding cheap airfare and good deals can make or break your entire budget sometimes.
What you’ll learn in this chapter is that airfare prices don’t make sense. None. They can change day-to-day, hour-to-hour, and the prices can change drastically depending on where you stopover and what hours or days you leave.
For instance, I once flew to London from Austin, Texas for $297 with a single stop in NYC, whereas a ticket from Boston to London (with a stop in Dublin) ran over $500.
I recently booked a trip from Colombia to Turkey. When I looked at a simple round-trip ticket from Medellin to Istanbul, it came out to over $1,700. But when I added Italy to the itinerary and searched for Medellin -> Rome -> Istanbul -> Medellin (with layovers in Madrid and Milan respectively), the entire trip came out to $1,100 – a total steal.
Does this make sense? Not at all.
The first part of this chapter will talk about how to search for airfare. There are some tricks that most people don’t know. Since airfare prices fluctuate so much, a knowledgeable person can try combinations and variations of a route to find cheaper tickets.
You don’t always find one – in fact, I’d say you only find a ridiculously cheap fare ¼ of the time or so. But usually you can at least shave a few hundred dollars off the price you get on the first try. The next section of the chapter will cover miles and points and how you can “hack” your way around the world by earning free flights.
Then, I’ll go over Round The World (RTW) tickets and the advantages of those for those of you who plan massive itineraries in advance.
And then we’ll round out the chapter by talking about buses and trains. Not the ideal modes of transportation, but a godsend in certain regions (Latin America) and for people on a strict budget (Ecuador to Peru for $10? Yes, please.)
Gaming the System
Like I mentioned earlier, airfare is calculated in often strange and unpredictable ways. Sometimes these “glitches” in the way airlines calculate their fares benefit us, other times they hurt us.
I have two theories on why more complicated or less obvious airfare routes can often be cheaper: 1. When booking a trip that involves flights from multiple airlines, the algorithms are imperfect
and sometimes spit out bizarre prices that benefit you. For instance, my trip to Istanbul and Italy from Colombia involves Avianca (Colombian), Alitalia (Italian), and Iberian (Spanish). Not only are these disparate airlines, but they’re also in different airline alliances (which I’ll explain in a minute).
2. Airlines are constantly price-testing tickets. What that means is that they may show 20% of people a higher price and 20% of people a lower price to see which one sells quicker and ends up more profitable, especially if it’s a particular popular or unpopular route. This is why you can often search on Kayak or Expedia and get a price and a few hours later get a completely different price for the same flight. And then a few hours later, the original price comes back. The trick is to know what to look for and spend a few hours looking around to find the best
possible fairs. Below is a rundown of the process I go through when I look for airfare.
1. There are two website which you are going to need to use in conjunction with one another:
http://www.kayak.com
andhttp://www.skyscanner.com
Kayak aggregates all of the airfares from every travel agency into one search result. So when you search for Los Angeles to Houston, you get the results from all of the airlines, Expedia, Vayama, Cheaptickets, etc., all in one place.
Skyscanner allows you to do blanket searches from a certain airport to an entire country, or from one country to the next. So instead of checking all of the individual flights between the hubs between the east coast of the United States and Spain manually (i.e., checking NYC to Madrid, NYC to Barcelona, Washington to Madrid, Washington to Barcelona, etc.), you can just type in: “United States” and “Spain” and Skyscanner will tell you the cheapest connection available at that time.
2. Know your hub airports like the back of your hand. Hub airports are the largest airports in any given region and they’re determined by how much air traffic goes through them. They are chosen both based on population as well as geography. The closer to the center of a region or continent they are, the more air traffic they will get.
For instance, one would assume Philadelphia Airport is a major hub airport, right?
Actually, no. JFK Airport is, as is Newark, New Jersey, two airports within less than an hour
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are massive hubs, but they are due to their central location on the continent.
It’s important to know your hub airports because direct flights between hub airports are most likely to be your cheapest fares. For instance, NYC to London Heathrow is going to be cheaper than Pittsburgh to London Luton.
Hubs are your starting point for finding the cheapest routes.
Here’s a run down of the major hubs in each region (minus Africa). This is by no means conclusive. It’s just based on my observations and experiences.
North America: Boston Logan JFK
Newark
Charlotte (US Airways’ hub to Europe)
Miami (biggest jump-off point to Latin America) Atlanta (Delta’s main hub)
Chicago O’Hare (Hub for mostly N. American destinations) Dallas/Fort Worth
Toronto
LAX (Always has best fares to Australia, Fiji and New Zealand) Seattle/Tacoma (Best fares to S. Korea, Japan and China
Europe:
London Heathrow (discount airlines are based out of Gatwick and Luton) Madrid (The primary hub between Europe and South America)
Frankfurt (Mostly a hub throughout Europe) Berlin Brandenburg
Rome
Amsterdam
Moscow (best connection between Europe and Asia) Middle East:
Istanbul
Dubai (biggest hub between Asia, Europe and Africa) Latin America:
Mexico City (Surprisingly not that great of a hub)
Panama City Bogota Lima
São Paulo Guarulhos Buenos Aires Santiago Asia: Beijing Tokyo Seoul Hong Kong
Bangkok (regional hub)
Kuala Lumpur (Air Asia’s home base)
I’m sure I’m missing some. And there are a myriad of smaller regional hubs that I’m leaving out (i.e., Singapore, Denver), but those are the major ones that come to mind.
3. The reason hub airports are important is because the cheapest airfares go from one hub to another. The first thing you always want to look at is to see if daisy-chaining flights together manually saves you any money.
For instance, if you live in Memphis, Tennessee and want to go to Valencia, Spain (two non- hub airports), you can use Skyscanner to find that the cheapest round-trip tickets from the US to Spain during your dates are from JFK in New York and Miami, both to Madrid. From there you can check the cost between the domestic locations and add them up.
So for instance (and I’m just making this up), let’s say searching for Memphis to Valencia alone brings back a cheapest fare of $1,050 round-trip (RT).
You may find a fare from Miami to Madrid for $620 RT, a $200 RT fare between Memphis and Miami, and then find a domestic discount airline in Spain (such as Vueling) that will take you to Valencia and back for $75. Suddenly, that $1,050 fare is $895, a 15% savings.
There are two problems you’ll run into with daisy chaining flights. The first is that often you get ugly times and layovers. You find that the only $200 flight that gets you to Miami in time arrives five hours before the flight to Madrid and leaves at 7 o’clock in the morning.
These days, I’ve started opting out of some of these ugly itineraries because I value my sleep and don’t mind paying an extra $150 to not feel like shit the entire way over. But when I was younger and more broke, I did a lot of trips like this.
(Ah, memories of sleeping in Charles De Gaulle Airport as well as trying to catch a couple of hours on the cold floor of Lima, Peru before heading to my 6AM connection to Brazil.
believe it or not, it gets pretty fucking cold in the Andes. It’s not all tropical bikinis all the time like you think.)
The other problem with daisy chaining is that you have to collect your luggage and check-in again each time. Also, if one flight is delayed and you miss the next, since you’re on two separate itineraries, the airline may not help you out or give you another ticket for missing it. So it’s almost better to allow yourself extra-long layovers in between legs of your trip.
Daisy chaining seems to work better in the developing world than North America and Europe. I think it’s because the airlines in the West are better networked with one another and are able to keep track of who’s flying where and adjust their prices accordingly. Places like Latin America and Asia don’t do this, so you can often find some crazy deals and itineraries if you hunt around enough.
Daisy chaining works fairly often. Unfortunately, it rarely saves you more than 20-25% of the cost on airfare. So you’re unlikely to ever find ridiculous savings by daisy chaining.
4. Make a habit of checking “alternative” airports if you’re not getting a great fare at first. For instance, most major international cities have 2-3 airports, or often there’s a city extremely close with an airport as well and you can get a better fare. For instance, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf are very close to one another and are both large international airports. New York City has three airports (JFK, La Guardia, and Newark in New Jersey) within an hour. Honestly, it usually doesn’t make much of a difference, but it’s still worth checking.
Services like Kayak have a “add nearby airports” button for their searches that will do this automatically for you.
5. The next “hack” to check out is multi-city flights. When you look for a two-city fare, often they’ll pin you with layovers. For instance, you search for flights from Houston to Rio de Janeiro and it takes you through Panama City or Lima, Peru.
Strangely, if you look for a three-city fare and put in Houston, Lima and Rio de Janeiro, occasionally you’ll save money, and sometimes you’ll save big.
I already mentioned above how I saved over $500 on a RT ticket from Colombia to Turkey by ADDING a stop in Italy (which, by the way, I plan on taking full advantage of and staying there for a week).
I got a steal flying home from Asia last year by adding a stop in Beijing between Bangkok and Seattle, and then daisy chaining from Seattle to Austin (where my family is).
The initial fare from Bangkok to Austin was pushing $1,400 for a one-way trip. When I daisy chained through Seattle it brought it down to around $1,100. When I added the stop in Beijing, it came down to slightly less than $900 total. Not bad.
Another example of this when I bought a ticket from Colombia to Brazil and found that adding
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Lima to the itinerary and staying there for a few days actually reduced the overall ticket price from $840 to $770. So I stayed in Lima. And bought a discount airline ticket to Cuzco to see Machu Picchu. Which brings me to…
6. Discount airlines. Get familiar with them. Most of them actually DON’T pop up on the travel agency websites and aggregators. You need to google “X discount airline,” where X is the country.
Also check WikiTravel and LonelyPlanet for local discount airlines.
Just to give you a recent example. That same trip to Turkey, every flight within the country from Istanbul to other major cities ran at least a few hundred dollars. The only airlines popping up was Turkish Airlines and an occasional Pegasus Airlines which wasn’t much better. But a quick Google search uncovered that there are two local discount Turkish airlines: Atlas Air and Anadolu Jet.
You can often get absolutely absurd deals with discount airlines. I’ve scored a Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur flight for $40 and a Amsterdam to Barcelona flight for $35 in the past.
Here are some discount airlines to look out for and the regions they serve: Spirit Air (North America)
TACA (South America) Ryan Air (Europe) EasyJet (Europe)
Wizz Air (Eastern Europe) Vueling (Spain)
Berlin Air (Germany) Jetstar (Australia) Air Asia (SE Asia)
Tiger Airways (SE Asia/Australia)
Nature Air (Costa Rica/Central America)
There are a few aggregator websites for discount airlines and only discount airlines. Check out:
http://www.wegolo.com http://www.aireuropa.com
7. The time and day you choose to go will affect your fare significantly as well. Late at night or very early in the morning are always cheapest. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the cheapest days and Fridays and Saturdays are the most expensive.
Also, always be aware of holiday rushes – Christmas is obvious, but also Carnaval (South America – yes, other countries have Carnavals too), Victory Day (Eastern Europe), Ramadan or a royal wedding (oops).
prices not only over the course of days but also hours.
If you’re looking at a fare and suddenly you go to buy it and it says the price is higher, come back a day or two later. Often times the price will drop back down later.
9. Once you’ve found a route you like, check foreign travel sites of the countries involved. They will sometimes offer the same flight for less (or more).
For instance, if you’re flying from the US to Brazil, check the flight both from the US sites and the Brazilian sites. You’ll be surprised how much they vary.
But to be able to do this step, you MUST have a good bank account with currency conversions. If you have a bank that hoses you on currency conversions (as in, they charge a 5% conversion fee), then you will eliminate any of the savings you may otherwise get.
How do you find foreign travel sites, you say? Well, that’s what I’m here for. I would list some major ones here, but that would take forever. Here’s what you do:
1. Open up two web browsers. Take one to Google Translate: http://translate.google.com
2. In the other, do a Google search for “Google [country]” where the country is wherever you’d like to look at flights from. For instance, if we want to check the Brazilian prices on flights from the US to Brazil, then we’d type in “Google Brazil”
3. The first result will be Google’s version for that country. In this case, it’s
http://www.google.com.br. Google has a site for every country. So for Turkey it’s
http://www.google.com.tr, for Argentina it’s http://www.google.com.ar, etc.
4. In Google Translate, type in “Flights to New York” or wherever you plan on flying from. Then translate it into the language of the country you want to fly to. In this case, the phrase in Portuguese is “Voos para Nova Iorque”.
5. Copy and paste that translated phrase into the Google version of the foreign country. 6. The search results will return all of the online travel agencies and flight aggregators of
that country. In this case, the first result for our US-Brazil flight IN Brazil is
http://www.voosbaratos.com (the translation is literally “cheapflights.com”)
7. Most foreign travel agency sites and aggregators will have translators on the page themselves. But if they don’t on the Google results, click “Translate this page.”
8. Search for the same flight or itinerary, but this time search for it from the other country. 9. Currency conversions can always be found at www.xe.com.
10. Generally speaking, the further from the flight date you are, the cheaper it’s going to be. I think in years past this was a more surefire way of getting cheaper fares, but I’ve found the last year or two that prices are pretty stable whether I’m buying them four months in advance or only a couple weeks.
I’ve heard that if you wait until the day before a flight to purchase it, you can get it at a ridiculously discounted rate. My experience with this has actually been the opposite. If you wait until the day before or the day of to buy a ticket, chances are you are going to be paying a lot of money, even if it’s a brief trip.
Racking Up Points
Anyone who wants to travel for extended periods of time needs to be at least aware of the points and rewards systems out there that airlines run.
Believe it or not, I actually don’t focus a whole lot on racking up points. But that’s because it doesn’t reflect my lifestyle well. I use a lot of discount airlines, and regularly have no idea where I’m going to go until a few weeks or a month beforehand. On top of that, I spend almost no time inside the United States, which is by far the best place to rack up your points.
That said, if you’re reading this and you’re of the “I have a day job but just want to take awesome vacations once or twice a year” variety, then I HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommend paying attention here because if you know what you’re doing then you won’t have to pay anything on a significant amount of your trips.
I know people who live and die by their miles and rack up some amazing free trips with them. My mother, for one (a travel agent of 20+ years), gets multiple free trips to Caribbean Islands each year for doing little more than using her credit card wisely.
My girlfriend (from Brazil) has used her points to earn free airfare to the United States and Europe multiple times over the past few years.
I think miles are better suited for people who want to do one or two large vacations each year, plan on staying in hotels and/or resorts and are comfortable planning months and months in advance. If you’re like me, and fly by the seat of your pants (no pun intended) and buy tickets from obscure Russian airlines and show up to airports forgetting which airline you bought your ticket from, then points won’t be as important to you.
1. Lesson number one for understanding frequent flyer miles are the alliances. There are three alliances: Star Alliance, Sky Team, and One World.
Each of these alliances is a group of 10-25 airlines who share frequent flyer miles with one another, and most of them have at least one airline represented on each continent (although not always). As an international globetrotter, it’s therefore important to pick an alliance and make an effort to stick to those airlines wherever you go.
Some major airlines in each alliance:
Star Alliance: United Airlines, US Airways, Air Canada, Air New Zealand, TACA, TAM Airlines, Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, Air China.
Sky Team: Delta Airlines, Air France, KLM, Korean Air, Alitalia, Aeromexico.
One World: American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, LAN, Qantas. Full lists can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_alliance