How To Find Cheap Flights in 2021? My Top 11 Tips
By: Emily Styles
Tags: Travel Tips And Tricks, Discount Flights, Flights Booking, Travel Tips, Cheap Flights

1. Cheap Flight Tips 2021 — Booking in advance?

Do cheap travel tips, booking logic and best practices from the post Covid world apply in 2021? The jury is still out with regard to whether you save money by booking well in advance in 2021. Even if you are looking for cheap flights to Hawaii, from what we’ve seen over the last few months there are some interesting last minute deals to be had. This has always somewhat been true as empty flights need to fill up seats and sometimes they will discount a few days or week before if the plane is not yet full.

The point here is if you have a bit of flexibility try to book a ticket — for example flights to Costa Rica — well in advance with cancellation insurance or free switching and keep an eye on tickets that pop up a few days before your flight, you might be able to find a deal here!

2. Be as flexible as possible with your flight dates

A lot has most likely changed over the last year due to Covid and what made sense one or two years ago in terms of booking on a Tuesday or a specific day isn’t necessarily true anymore. We at bookflights.io suggest to take a look at a calendar one or two months out and see if you can notice any patterns developing in terms of when the cheap flights are. Triangulate your ‘insights’ by using Google flights, Skyscanner, Book Flights (us!), etc.

Just enter your arrival and departure cities — like ‘one-way ticket to Hawaii’ — start by looking at one-way fares and don’t enter a return date. In that way you’ll be able to see an entire month of prices — rinse and repeat for your return flight. We suggest mixing it up and using a combination of APP’s and different websites to arrive at a ‘reasonable fare’ the location you’re trying to get to.

3. Use a VPN do and if possible incognito mode on your browser

There’s no question that airlines offer a cheaper prices for people in countries other than the G8 countries or countries with a high GDP. If you’re able to use a VPN (virtual private network) and change your browsing location — for example if you live in the US and change the server to Mexico or Peru — you might get a 20 to 30% discount. You might also try changing the currency (i.e., non USD, GBP, Euro, etc.) if you do not have a VPN, sometimes this can work.

If you’re not into getting a VPN you can always clear your cache and cookies in your browser — my colleague recommends this as one of the top tips for cheap flights. By opening an incognito window in your browser and searching ‘flights to Tokyo’ the aforementioned should already taken care of. You might also try switching devices as well — i.e., toggle between tablet, laptop and mobile.

4. Flying global — book local!

The majority of flight aggregators will not list local airlines in the top results. Try surfing to the local airlines website directly to compare prices like ‘flights to Thailand’ if you cannot find the place you’re looking for on the aggregator website. As they all have affiliate relationships and partnerships with the major airlines typically you can find some interesting deals even if you’re flying to multiple destinations on the same trip.

5. Join fare alert subscriber lists or set up on google alerts

Follow and subscribe to budget airlines social media accounts like SpiceJet, Air Asia, GoAir, etc. There are also several city specific groups you can join that regularly publish updates from all of the airlines — for example the ‘Vancouver YVR’ community is pretty popular and you can set up automatic emails on a daily or weekly basis to make sure you are aware of flight deals.

We suggest doing in general Google search to look for these type of groups and try to join a few per your most traveled destination — cheap flights to Germany is one of our favorites! It’s really amazing what you can find and in some cases you can even join chartered flights were people sometimes even groups of nationals will charter a flight from one country to another — there are some pretty cool deals to be had if you can find the right group!

If you are super budget conscious you might even start looking at conferences and trade exhibitions websites as they might have relationships with airlines to fly their participants and guests at a discount rate. The latter is a bit of a longshot but we have heard instances where this was possible and savings of up to 20% or so were provided as long as you use their code when booking the flight.

6. Booking at midnight — really a tip for cheap flights in 2021?

We have heard reports from the field that sometimes big savings can be hard if you book at midnight or during the early hours of the morning. Although we don’t recommend going to sleep too late as it’s fair to say a good nights sleep is important, if you’re using the VPN trick you might find a way to hack this without having to stay up late.

We have not found a lot of evidence in terms of why this tip potentially works for finding cheap flights, but one of the thoughts is that airlines, at least local ones will update their affairs at midnight and in some cases the first few flight listings are discounted to improve search results for that flight.

If you guys have any suggestions please feel free to drop comments in the comment section, we’d love to hear from you and will do our best to share your insights with our community. I will be searching flights to Toronto in the coming weeks, so any suggestions would be great!

7. Book tickets to ‘cheaper’ destinations — top tip for cheap flights 2021!

If you’re looking to book a flight to Milan you might try booking a flight to Turin first. The rationale here is that you might save 20 to 30% if you book to a location close to the actual destination you’re looking for as there might be a premium on your end destinations. Given that Milan and Turin are fairly close — about a two hour train or car ride — you might save big and also have a chance to spend half a day in another city!

So to start this type of search, you would begin by searching for the cheapest places to travel using the budget slider on most of the online travel sites and then go from there. During our research any other tips for getting cheap flights in 2021 articles mentioned this, so there must be something to this! Can you combine the things we have mentioned so far in this article, absolutely yes and you might find some interesting cost saving combinations. Share with your friends and family and tell them what works best.

8. Join flight points plans

People will always tell you to be smart about how you book your flights so that you can optimize your flight points and reap these rewards.

Given that travel will get back to normal shortly it will be interesting to see how the airline companies will honor past points and incentivize their loyalty schemes going forward.

It’s fair to say that this practice will continue, so keep an eye on which airlines and travel groups are offering the best points deals. You might even find there’s some amazing in intensification schemes for new customers, keep an eye on this!

9. Good old-fashioned research

Nothing beats good old-fashioned research for finding tips for cheap flights in 2021 — or even in 2133! If you’re really determined to find a cheap flight you will and it just takes a bit of time. As mentioned previously in this post, you could end up finding an interesting combination of tips and tricks that have the end result of big savings. If you do please do share with the community here as we would love to hear what types of combinations work.

We recommend using a combination of different devices and VPN locations to optimize your potential for finding cheap flights and hotels. By using a VPN you can avoid having to stay up until midnight or the early hours of the morning to book a flight as well as you can get the benefit of booking from a cheaper location on the ideal day.

10. Join some industry associations or groups

It may come as no surprise that people that often fly to their home country — for example nonresident Indians, expats, etc. — or techies that fly to CES Las Vegas on a yearly basis are always looking for deals. By joining some of these groups and social networks — NB our colleague suggests this is probably the top tip for cheap flights in 2021 and going forward — you are doing yourself a favor as they almost always have daily if not weekly or monthly suggestions on how to find cheap flights and good deals typically from one city to another. In some cases as we have previously mentioned you might be able to find a chartered flight with you can join.

11. Remember Cheap Flights Tips in 2021 — and all will be good!

As you’re beginning to plan your next vacation or a business trip have Faith that the airline and travel industry will rebound and most likely will rebound very strong.

Think about all of the pent-up demand and general interest in traveling once restrictions begin to loosen. Some people tell us that prices will actually go up well we think the opposite is true.

The 2020s will definitely be the golden age of travel as people realize that life is short and you don’t actually have to work in one place anymore you can be a digital nomad were traveling hobo and still pay the bills. So long story short I have faith that one of the largest sector in service industries on the planet will rebound strongly and will most likely incentivize people to help with the recovery. This could translate into generous points and discounted rates for frequent fliers and or discounts across the board.

Thanks for reading our cheap flight travel tips 2021 article…

We hope you enjoyed this article and please do you subscribe on our YouTube channel and check out site — bookflights.io — from time to time as we try to find the best deals for you provide the most up-to-date information on travel and tourism in the places we love!

Again, if you have any suggestions or tips For finding tips on cheap flights in 2021 and beyond, we would love to hear from you as our community members are the best sources of information and any of the tips above were sourced from comments and discussions with our team, travel writers and first-hand experience living in traveling on the road.