Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Use This Travel Hack to Find Cheap Flights

I travel to 20+ countries a year sharing my firsthand knowledge of reward travel, travel credit card deals, travel tips and more.

On the first Sunday of every month, I Zoom into Leo Laporte’s and Mikah Sargent’s podcast Ask The Tech Guys. I do a 10- to 20-minute travel segment covering any notable news and suggest a helpful website or app for travelers. When Leo asked me a question about where people should go that’s cheap, I recommended a popular website with a little-known hack and they were blown away. RELATED: The Secret is Out! According to Google, These Are The Best Times to Book Flights

As I told Mikah and Leo, it all depends on where you’re departing from and where you’re going. For instance, when I performed a search, from L.A. (where I live), the cheapest place in the U.S. to travel to was Salt Lake City. But from Chicago, Dallas, Miami and New York, the cheapest destinations were all different.

So, if you don’t really care where you’re going and just want to find cheap flights, then I recommend using Google.com/travel/flights and inputting your dates (specific or flexible), home city and then in the destination box, type ‘Anywhere.’ See screenshot above.

Users can then zoom in and out all over the world to find out what current fares are. Keep in mind, there are a lot of low-fare carriers out there that like to ‘trick’ customers into finding super cheap flights but then charge them for all kinds of incidentals. Airlines like Frontier and Spirit can charge up to $100 just to use the overhead bin space. Don’t fly these airlines unless you know all of their fees and tricks.

That’s why I always tick the boxes under airlines and choose one or all three major airline alliances … Star Alliance (United, Air Canada, EVA…), SkyTeam (Delta, Air France, Korean…) and Oneworld (American, British Airways, Qantas…).

You can also just choose one airline, as well as how many stops, duration, class, price range, etc.

For example, if you haven’t made Thanksgiving plans yet, see the screenshot at the top, which shows round-trip flights departing Los Angeles for the most popular travel days (the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and the Sunday after).

If you want to be smart with your money, you would wait until the following week to travel when planes and airports will be much less crowded and, most of all, cheaper. See the screenshot above for flights from L.A. for the following week.

If you want to go to Europe and don’t have a specific place, just narrow your search down to “Europe” and you can zoom in and out. You can do this for destinations all over the world. BTW: Have you seen how cheap flights to Europe are right now? You can fly to Paris for under $550 round-trip over Thanksgiving.

One thing to remember is that not all airlines are on Google Flights, like Southwest Airlines. You can only book them at Southwest.com. And Google Flights isn’t the only website that offers this type of search. Kayak Explore is another major player.

I hope this helps you or your loved ones see the world for a lot cheaper. But before you book your flights, you might want to make sure you can find accommodations for a reasonable price. Here’s why: Why Every Traveler Should Know Taylor Swift’s Upcoming Concert Cities and Dates

KEEP READING:
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