In December, my family of five flew to Florida for less than $300. I talked about my secrets and strategies for finding the best airline ticket prices on Instagram stories and I had an incredible response from followers asking me how I found the cheap flights.
Since so many of you are interested in this topic, I’ve done my best to summarize how I found the best prices to fly to Florida. I’m hoping you’ll find it helpful to use these same strategies wherever it is you are looking to fly—whether in the northeast, to the south, southwest or internationally!
1. Start Checking Prices Now
Let’s say you and your husband are brainstorming about an upcoming anniversary trip, or you have the dream of flying your kids to Disney World. The minute you have that dream, just stop for a quick moment and look up what prices are. If you’re really good, jot a quick note down with today’s date and note the price in a journal. Then next time you dream about it, check again and compare the price.
Start researching and investigating flight prices even a year in advance if you can. I always try to look up flights at least a couple of months ahead of time.
Begin with a wide, quick, general search. By that I mean, don’t worry about finding the best price, just use something like Google or JetRadar. Those usually don’t have the best prices, but they give you a general idea of what to expect.
One of the things I love about doing a quick search on Google, is that they offer extra information windows like this one that tells me whether prices are currently typical, low or high for my trip. (see below)
2. Check Prices Regularly
There used to be a myth that the more often you check, the more airlines will increase the price of that airline. Sometimes in the past I felt this was true, but overall, my experience has been that if I check once a week for several weeks, I’m just learning the curves and timing of their sales.
I often don’t check religiously because let’s face it, life gets busy. But once every other week or so, tends to give you a great idea of how prices are changing.
Stay calm and don’t freak out. It is good to be a risk taker here. As I was checking prices for our trip to Florida, I did miss a really good deal that was the best price for awhile. For several weeks I actually thought we’d be driving because I couldn’t find that great of a price again. But because I waited it out, I found an even better price!
3. Consider Several Airports
For our trip to Florida, we started by looking at the most convenient airports for us. We were hoping to fly out of Harrisburg (MDT) or Philadelphia (PHL), and in to Tampa (TPA), Sarasota (SRQ) or Orlando (MCO). Orlando would have been way out of the way, but because they have incredible rates, it was at least worth considering and checking.
Over time as I checked each of these airports and various combinations of flight scenarios, I learned that it was cheapest to fly from Harrisburg to Orlando, or Philadelphia to Sarasota. But there were also really fantastic rates to Tampa.
4. Be Flexible with Flight Dates and Times
When searching dates for flights, you absolutely must keep in mind the trick of using the rate calendar view for prices. I can never find the button for this when I’m using my phone, so I always recommend searching for flight prices on your actual computer.
Not every family has the luxury to be very flexible with dates but if you can be flexible when you fly, you’ll be able to get the best price. Thankfully my husbands work allowed him to take off a day early when we found a way to save several hundred dollars by flying out a day earlier than we had planned.
As you are searching, look at different times of day for flight prices too. You might save a lot of money by choosing an afternoon flight (business people want the early morning flights). I noticed on Spirit Airlines when writing this post, that you could save $20/ticket (if you join $9 fare club—see next point to learn more about that).
Sometimes you’ll also get the best price if you can fly last minute. Now that takes a very flexible schedule, but you certainly can find great flight deals this way. I don’t know if you call this last minute or not, but we ended up buying our tickets about 3 weeks before we flew. We bought our tickets just before Thanksgiving and flew in the middle of December.
5. Don’t Overlook Memberships
I know it is tempting to NOT want to spend money on something like an airline membership, especially if you will likely only fly one time in the next year, but it might actually save you more money than you think to spend a little bit and join an airline membership.
For our trip to Florida, it was cheapest to fly Frontier Airlines and get the discounted tickets by purchasing a $60 Discount Den membership. That also allowed us to take advantage of their special kids fly free days. (Two of our kids flew FREE because of our membership—one kid per adult can fly free.)
We spent $280 on tickets, plus the $60 on membership, for a total of $340 for all five tickets. The kids were not part of the fly free program for our return flight, but it still worked out better to get the free tickets on the way down! Kind of crazy, but I think we would have spent at least $50 more to NOT buy the Discount Den membership.
I have never flown Spirit Airlines, but they have something called the $9 Fare Club, which also costs $60, but saves you around $20/ticket at certain times of day. I’ve noticed their discounted flights are also around $20/ticket, just like Frontier.
6. Sign up for an Airline Credit Card
Another way to save, but some people are nervous about it, is signing up for an airline credit card. In our opinion, it depends on how you manage your money. For us, we use credit cards like they are debit cards. We never use them to spend money that we don’t already have in the bank. We like to use them because they earn us points and cash back rewards. But I digress….
Back to the airline credit card….you can sign up for an airline credit card that gives you 40,000 FREE points. Often this is enough to get two tickets for FREE. Some airlines offer credit cards that give you 60,000 or 80,000 points to sign up. It depends on the airline.
Many people don’t like this idea, and that’s completely fine! Please do what works for you.
If you choose to sign up for a credit card, you can often find the airline credit card offers by visiting their website. Both Frontier Airlines and Allegiant have a pop up box when you visit their page with their offer.
If you are planning an international trip, you can still utilize this trick. Let’s say you want to fly to Italy for your anniversary next year. Start looking at flights to Italy now and learn which airlines fly to Italy. Then see if they offer a credit card that will give you points. You’ll probably find an airline like Delta, United or Continental that flies to Italy (all of which offer rewards miles programs and credit cards).
Often times for these offers, you do need to spend a certain amount within a limited time frame, like $1000 in your first 90 days of opening the card. This is a reason to consider grabbing your credit card well in advance, since you won’t have the points to buy your ticket until your statement is closed and paid.
Read about how we flew to Hawaii for FREE for one of our anniversaries a few years ago. 🙂
7. Learn to Pack Light
One way we saved was by taking very little luggage. Our airline, Frontier, offered cheap tickets partly because we were only allowed a personal item—basically a purse, laptop bag, or child size backpack. We would have had to pay something like $20+ or more per ticket to include a carry-on, or $40 for checked-in luggage.
This wasn’t a problem for us because we were staying with family and could wash our clothes if needed. We also took very few activities, books or devices on the airplane.
8. Be Willing to Accept Some Risk
I add this last point, because I need to mention one more thing about our cheap tickets. We were able to buy 5 tickets for just $280 through the Frontier Discount Den program with kids flying free, largely because we accepted the risk of not requesting assigned seats.
We knew this was a risk. It was very possible that when we checked-in for our flight we would be assigned seats that separated our family and maybe even separated us from our kids.
- We figured it was unlikely they would separate a child ticket from a parent ticket.
- We figured if we were separated that someone on the flight would be sympathetic and trade with us, so that at very minimum we could have one parent with one kid and our oldest could probably sit by himself.
- We figured checking in early would help us sit together. We made sure we checked-in 24 hours in advance (literally I set a timer on my phone for 24 hours before take-off and made sure I checked in immediately!) It worked and all our seats were together and within the first 10 rows of the plane on both flights!!!!!
None of this was guaranteed. It was certainly a risk, but we were glad it worked out well in the end!
More Tips for Finding the Best Airline Prices
How do I keep organized notes?
I mentioned this before, but keep a log on your computer or in a notebook and jot down some of the best prices you find, dates, airlines and times. Or you might find it easier to just screenshot your flight searches and throw them in a folder. They’ll all have a date and you can look back at them later to quickly see how prices have changed.
How To Save On Airport Parking
Depending which airport you fly out of you might want to consider parking rates. Harrisburg is such an easy airport to get to, so quick to navigate and parking is truly affordable. Philadelphia has more expensive parking, so if we can we often find family or friends to drive us to the airport to save money.
If you’ll need to pay for parking consider these places to check for the best rates. Often you’ll pay a lot more to park at the actual airport parking lots.
Which airlines are cheapest?
It really depends where you are flying, but in the past, we have found these airlines to have the best prices. Some of these airlines have also come highly recommended by my blog readers!
National Flights
International Flights
- Delta
- United / Continental
- Malaysia Airlines
- Latam Airlines
- Swiss International Airlines
- Air France
I almost always find the best price by going directly to the airline page instead of purchasing through flight search engines, but you never know what you will find, so here’s a list of great flight search engines. My new favorite is JetRadar, as I find it makes it really simple for me to quickly see accurate prices from many different airlines in the calendar view mode. OneTravel is another new favorite of mine.
- Airfare Watchdog
- Cheap Air
- Cheap Flights Freak
- Cheap Flights
- Cheap O Air
- Cheap Tickets
- Expedia
- Flight Hub
- Flights Mojo
- JetRadar
- OneTravel – find airfare for under $49!
- Orbitz
- Priceline
Are the airline seats comfortable?
Sometimes people find the cheapest airlines less comfortable. I tend to be a pretty flexible person, especially on a short flight of 2 hours or less. The seats did not bother me, nor the space.
I would say that space was tighter than some flights on the Frontier airline, and the seats were definitely thin. They also didn’t recline. But not one of my kids complained they were uncomfortable and I don’t remember my husband complaining either. I think its easy to be grateful for whatever conditions when I pay so little for my ticket! 🙂
Just to give you a glimpse though, I took a few photos of the seats so you can see what they look like.
I hope that answers some of your questions on how to find cheap flights, and what the experience of cheap flights might be like for you. Please message me on Facebook, Instagram or by email if you have any other questions! I’m happy to help!
