Low Airfare Offers

What is the best way to find the cheapest fare? The three new strategies

"and you' ll find 50 different rival philosophies. They are all wrong," George Hobica said to me the other night at noon. He is the creator of AirfareWatchdog, the airfare website that offers some cheap rates not found on other websites. "Don't pay any attention to someone who says that there is a magical period or a magical date to buy airline tickets.

There'?s no such thing as clandestine times. It' not nearly as easy as Tuesdays at 3 p.m. Easter or Wednesdays at 1 a.m. But George has just put together his 12 tips for finding cheap air fares, issue 2014, to make it easy for you to shop on the plane. Maintain your fare hunt results page open all day on your computer monitor.

Regardless of which airline ticket finder you use, simply keep your web browsing interface open on your computer monitor and click "Update" at least four daily. Carriers are changing rates all the time, George says, and "even if the rates don't go up, the number of available places changes to this rate".

Flexibility to find dates allows you to find fares within a specific period of timeframe and find the cheapest dates for flight within that area. I have always used ITA software for this, but George suggests two utilities that are simpler for many to use. In the kayak, please enter your e-mail adress, click on "Flights", then on "More searching options" and select "Flex Month".

Concerning Google's Explore Flights utility, you can specify a travel duration and a months so that you can look for the cheapest rates within any timeframe. Use Adioso if you are agile about your goal. If you are open to proposals as to where you should go and you just want a good fare, Adioso works well because it allows you to look not just for a particular target town, but for an area.

Rather than limiting your query to "New York City to Copenhagen", you can enter "New York City to Europe" and see what is available in April or May. Naturally, the simplest way to avoid time-consuming airline tickets is to send low fare e-mails to your inbox.

AirfareWatchdog's tariff warnings cover promotional codes at reduced rates as well as Southwest Airlines' low-cost tariffs that other websites may not take into account. My personal favourite among the three kinds of ticket price alarms is the "Departure City Alarme", because I want to know what surprises appear from my home base and other aerodromes at a suitable walking distance from home.

What is your best flight tip?