Booking flight tickets is the most important step before travelling as the booking will eventually shape your whole trip monetarily and in a timely fashion. If you are planning a vacation during holidays you are in for a tour with expensive accommodation, expensive flights and expensive food.
There are a lot of ways to save money in the above mentioned expensive categories. The initial step for travelling is to book airline tickets.
Mostly, people are robbed in this initial step of their trip as they are steered into buying expensive tickets when they can get that same flight ticket for less money. The reason why people tend to pay more money is because they lack the proper knowledge of how to book online flight tickets.
Cheap flight tickets are a dime a dozen. All you have to do is pay attention to the little details regarding the matter.
10 Money Saving Tips To Book Flight
Here we are going to enlist 10 Tips on how to save money while booking flight tickets:
1. Post-Dated Bookings
It is understandable that sometimes trips may be planned at the eleventh hour but that does not happen often. It is always best to get your flight booking well before the travelling time i.e. approximately 4 to 6 weeks before your date of travelling.
This is suggested because as the time of flight comes nearer, the airlines get multitudes of booking requests and hence prices rise sometimes even up to 4 times the original price.
2. Avoid Weekend Flights
Most of the people prefer travelling on weekends which is their off time from work or schools and colleges. That is why more than 75% travelling has been seen only on weekends as compared to the week days.
Simple Economics comes into play here; “Rise in Demand results in Rise in Price”.
So if you have an option, travel on weekdays instead of weekends and you will be saving a lot of money.
3. Book Connecting Flights
Longer flights usually have layovers. For example if you are travelling from the UK to China, you get flights with layovers to different locations for different time periods.
Here you have to keep in mind that a direct flight costs more as compared to a layover flight. Furthermore, the longer the layover, the cheaper the fare. Hence it is suggested that you always try to book tickets for a layover flight.
4. Slim Down On In-Flight Services
Most of the airlines charge extra bills for using in-flight services like catering, entertainment, Wi-Fi and other such facilities. These extras might take your ticket price up by 3 to 4 times.
Here I can suggest a couple of things to you like skipping the Wi-Fi service. Download your music or movies or cartoons beforehand on your home Wi-Fi and just enjoy it on your flight.
You can also slim down on your meals for the duration of the flight and make do with some snacks and drinks alone as food served to you in the air is almost 5 to 10 times expensive as it is on the ground or better yet, bring your own food from home and save a considerable amount of money.
5. Let The Airline Select Your Seat
Airline fares go up when you opt to book a seat of your own choice as such people tend to book Exit row seats or sometimes seats close to the bathrooms.
When you book a seat of the airline’s choice, you pay less as compared to when you select your own seats.
6. Travel With A Light Baggage
Always try to travel with as low baggage as can be managed. If you booked a flight ticket with basic fare and your baggage is in excess of the prescribed weight limit, you will have to pay an extra amount for the baggage.
If you can’t skip the baggage then be sure to pay the baggage fee online before going to the airport. This is suggested because baggage fees are tripled over at the airports and are very low when you pay them online beforehand.
7. Get A Frequent Flyer Card
A lot of airlines provide their passengers with FFC’s (Frequent Flyer Cards). These cards enable the card holder to accumulate his travelling points and earn huge bonuses which can be used later on for flight bookings without having to pay any money.
This option is considered best for businessmen and other such people who travel much too often.
8. Use Incognito Mode While Booking
It is common human nature to search for the same thing over and over again. When this happens with booking flight tickets, the result is a rapid increase in the ticket prices with every iteration of the search.
If circumstances force you to search for the same flight again and again, make sure you are using your web browser in incognito mode.
Incognito mode allows the user to keep surfing the web without storing cookies and hence the website doesn’t know how many times that specific user has visited the same link, which in turn stops the rapid increase in the fares of the flight tickets.
9. Use Local Currency
It is always advisable to pay for the flight tickets in the currency of the country from where you want to board the flight.
This might save you plenty of cash as you might get a low currency exchange rate which ends up with you paying $100 instead of $150.
10. Book Tickets From The Airline Directly
The final piece of advice on how to save money on your flight bookings is that you must always try to book your tickets from the airline office directly. You might end up saving 20% to 30% of your ticket price this way.
The thing is that if you get a travel agent to book your flight for you, he will charge you for his services. The travel agency will also charge its commission on the ticket price from you.
