The Cheapest International Flights

Apart from the occasional last minute special, fares almost always rise as your date of departure draws near. Here is the date of booking, the best date for buying European flights is at least three month in advance so the later in summer that you can go, the better. Except when there is a certain and immutable cause why you need to be in Europe on a certain date, be free with your itinerary.

You can use a kayak or TripAdvisor flights and choose the options "Flexible trip data". In the first two weeks of July, when I was looking for a New York to Paris plane, the price differential between the low and the high was $271, but remember the extra cost of an early start or later comeback.

Do you have to for example cover extra overnight stays and meal costs? The cheapest ticket for the already mentioned New York-to-Paris trip was on a Tuesday. Flights during the week are usually less expensive. Above all, London is one of the cheapest turnstiles in Europe, with a large number of budget carriers - easyJet and Ryanair are among the longest operating, most loved and cheapest.

The flights from Boston to Krakow in mid-July cost $1,172 inclusive of tax and charges, but the flight from Boston to London on the same day costs only $793. With Skyscanner.net - the best website to collect flights with Europe's budget carriers - we have calculated a price of 105 dollars for Ryanair flights between London and Berlin (and that's costly for Ryanair; we've seen prices of only 20 dollars!).

From the United States, flights usually arrive at London's Heathrow International Airport, while Ryanair departs from Stansted Airport 65 mile away - so you'll need to take a shuttleshuttle and schedule additional travelling there. Cheap carriers usually have much tighter baggage weights and smaller hand baggage dimensions than large carriers.

These pages can be a useful point of departure for getting an idea of which carriers are flying your planned itinerary, but you should also review specific carriers' web pages as well as lesser-known pages such as Vayama.com (specializing in international flights) and Momondo.com (an aggregate site that Frommer's recently described as "the best place to find the cheapest fares every time").

Even better, follow your preferred itineraries through websites such as FareCompare.com or Kayak.com. Packages that offer accommodation and/or car rentals can often help you safe cash by buying all the items of your journey separately, especially if you fly to different towns. I found, for example, a nine-day journey to Eastern Europe, for $1,309 per capita via EuropeanDestinations.com, which included New York-to-Prague and Budapest-to-New York flights, nine hotel stays, breakfasts, train rides between towns, and hotels tax.

Expedia's $932 per passenger per ticket alone; nine overnight stays valued at nine overnight stays would slightly over $754 ($377 per person) before you even consider the cost of the ticket or your morning meal.