✈️ Stretch Your Budget

Flights can get expensive fast, and if you haven’t booked many flights before, it can be hard to know whether you’re getting a good deal or not.

Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to stretch your budget and get the most value out of your money when booking flights:

Compare Different Airlines

Depending on where you’re flying to, there’s a big chance that multiple airlines can get you there. For example, 7 airlines regularly fly between New York and London. If you don’t compare the price between all 7, you could miss out on a better deal. To compare all of your options quickly, use a flight search aggregator like Google Flights or Skyscanner.

Fly with Budget Airlines

The rise of budget airlines across the world has made flying a lot more accessible and affordable. This is especially true in Europe, Asia and the US, where you’ll often find significantly cheaper flights on budget airlines like Ryanair, AirAsia or Spirit in comparison to major full-service airlines. Budget airlines also run multiple promotions throughout the year, so it’s a good idea to sign up to their mailing lists (or monitor the Deals section of this newsletter) to be notified whenever they’re offering discounted flights.

Set Alerts

Most flight search websites allow you to set alerts for specific flights, where they’ll notify you if the price changes. In my experience, this is one of the most underrated ways to find cheaper flights, as it takes all the effort out of manually searching for them.

Split Your Itinerary Into Multiple Tickets

If you’re planning to book a trip with at least one layover, try splitting the trip into multiple tickets. For example, let’s say you want to fly from London to Singapore. You could book the whole itinerary as one ticket, or you could try breaking it down into two, with a stop in a third city, like Dubai for example.

Rather than booking one ticket from London to Singapore, you’d book one from London to Dubai, and another from Dubai to Singapore. Spreading a trip over multiple tickets can save you a lot of money, but requires a lot more flexibility - If any delays occur to your first flight that cause you to miss the second, you’d need to rebook your second flight at your own expense. Also note that if you’re travelling with luggage, you’ll need to re-check it at your stopover city.

Pack Light

To avoid paying hefty checked bag fees, pack as light as possible. It’s easy to get carried away while packing, so only pack items that you know you’ll need on your trip.

Start Earning Miles

If you’d rather not spend any cash on flights at all, you can pay for them with airline miles. I talk about how you can do this extensively in these articles ⤵