Note:

The following advice is mainly applicable to travelers looking to either start or end their travel in North America.

Budget travelers have a unique advantage over other types of travelers, as in most cases we are extremely flexible when it comes to making plans for travel. There are very few places on the planet we wouldn’t like to visit at least once, and if the price is right we are usually willing to take off any time of year.

While most budget travelers abide by this philosophy, I am often surprised to see that more budget travelers don’t use this flexibility to save themselves money. While the airline industry has made a science out of screwing people over who need to fly on specific dates, the flexible traveler can often find hundreds of great deals every month if they take advantage of their flexibility. The problem in the past was that nobody, not even budget travelers, had time to check internet airline fares every single day to hundreds of different destinations around the world for hundreds of different date combinations. In this situation the airlines won out, charging high fares for popular travel dates, and making it too difficult to stay on top of more flexible options. However, today things are different. There are now a number of services available on the web that take all the work out of monitoring flexible airfares, and pass that information on to you.

How it works:

The basic idea here is that airfares go on sale every single day. Sometimes these discounts are negligible, but sometimes the fare drops as much as 50%. The problem is that, usually, the only people that notice cheap fares are the people that were already looking to travel to that destination on those particular dates. This is because most travelers choose a destination and time frame first, then search for flights. Budget travelers, however, are different. We’ll go pretty much anywhere, and are usually willing to go at any time of year. This gives us a great edge in taking advantage of discounted airline fares, if only we can stay abreast of all the deals.

Requirements to using flexibility to get cheap airfares:

The only real requirement, is that you must truly be flexible. You can still use the following advice if you are not a flexible traveler, but you will really limit yourself as to the number of deals you can take advantage of if you are not willing to travel any time of the year (many great discounts can be found in low season) and to anywhere on the globe (not just Europe, N. America, and Australia).

The Services:

As I stated in the disclaimer above, the following two services are best used if you are traveling either to or from North America. You will only be able to use FareCompare.com if either your origin or destination city is in North America, and while you can use Kayak.com for searches outside of North America, they do not currently include many of the European and Asian discount operators in their search, which means you will not always be informed of the cheapest fares available.

Kayak’s Buzz: Kayak.com’s Buzz feature is a great tool for monitoring airfares around the world. All you do is register to Kayak’s website and input the fares you would like to track. Kayak will then contact you with the frequency you request for all fares that fall under a particular price level that you set. You can track specific point to point itineraries, for example I track fares from Quito, Ecuador to Washington DC. Or you can track fares from a specific city to an entire region, or popular cities around the world. I currently track fares from Washington DC and New York to Europe and Asia. Every couple of days I receive an email from Kayak informing me of the recent deals that have been found for the itineraries I am interested in. The big downside to Kayak’s service is that it only recognizes low fares to add to its Buzz database AFTER they have been searched for by another user. This means that you may not hear about a discount fare for a few days after it has been released because no Kayak users have searched for it. This also means that a range of dates for which the low fare is offered is not available, only the specific dates that other users have searched for.

Sign Up:

1. Go to Kayak.com, and click on register in the upper right hand corner
2. Fill in the registration page
3. Confirm your email address
4. Sign in to your new account and click on the “Buzz” link at the top of the page
5. Create the fare alerts you want to track, specifying origin, destination, max price, and how often you’d like to receive email alerts
6. Sit back and let the low fares come to you

Farecompare: Farecompare is a new site with a fantastic feature for tracking discounted airfares. The system works much like Kayak’s in that you sign-up, list the itineraries you are interested in tracking, and sit back and wait for them to contact you with great fares. The difference is that while Kayak only reports fares that have already been searched by other users, Farecompare automatically performs it’s own comprehensive searches for all destinations and dates to compile a list that is more accurate and up-to-date than Kayak’s. In fact, because Farecompare works so closely with the airlines, they are actually able to release discounted fares before the airlines themselves do. By staying on top of Farecompare’s listings, customers can ensure they are the first to hear about hot new fares, and can be first in line to purchase, as opposed to finding out a few days later after all the cheap tickets have already sold out.

Sign Up:

1. Go to the Farecompare.com homepage, and enter your email address to signup for “Airfare Deal Alerts” (right side of the screen)
2. You will then be taken to your personal Email Alerts Summary page (no email confirmation required)
3. Create the fare alerts you want to track
4. Sit back and let the low fares come to you

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