We’ve All Made This Mistake
Finding cheap flights can feel like solving a puzzle. You spot a great flight, decide to sleep on it — and when you come back the next morning, the price has jumped $80. Or you book what feels like a solid deal, only to hear your colleague paid half as much for the exact same route because they booked three weeks earlier.
Finding cheap flights isn’t luck. It’s a repeatable set of skills, and once you’ve got them, you’ll rarely overpay for airfare again. Here are the 10 strategies we use at AirDealsOnline every day.
1. Date Flexibility Is Your Single Biggest Lever
Even shifting your departure by one or two days can save you 20–40%. Flying on a Tuesday or Wednesday instead of Friday is consistently cheaper on almost every route. We’ve tracked Sydney–Bali fares that dropped from $450 to $290 simply by moving from a Friday to a Wednesday departure. Use Google Flights’ price calendar to see an entire month of fares at once — the cheapest days jump out immediately. That’s how you get cheap flights.
2. There’s a Booking Sweet Spot — And Most People Miss It
Booking earlier isn’t always better. For domestic flights, the sweet spot is roughly 1–3 months out. For international, aim for 3–6 months ahead. Book much earlier than that and you’re often paying more than someone who waits. Book too late and you’re paying scarcity pricing.
Exception to this rule: Christmas, school holidays, and Easter. For peak periods, book as early as humanly possible — the sweet spot doesn’t apply.
3. Always Search in Incognito Mode
Some booking websites use cookies to track your searches and nudge prices upward after repeated visits. It’s worth taking 10 seconds to open a private browser window every time you search. It costs you nothing and can genuinely make a difference. Don’t risk your privacy for cheap flights.
4. Set Fare Alerts and Let the Deals Come to You
Stop manually checking prices every day — it’s exhausting and inefficient. Set up fare alerts on Google Flights, Skyscanner, or Hopper. You tell the tool your route and a target price; it emails you the moment fares hit that level. We’ve caught Melbourne–London return flights under $900 this way, during brief flash sales that lasted only a few hours.
5. Compare Nearby Airports
If you’re within reasonable distance of more than one airport, always compare them. In the UK, checking Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, and Luton for the same route regularly surfaces price differences of $50–$150. The extra bus ride can be well worth it.
6. Use Skyscanner’s ‘Everywhere’ Search
Not locked into a destination? Open Skyscanner, enter your home city, type ‘Everywhere’ as the destination, and pick your dates. You’ll see the cheapest places you can fly to right now. Some of our favourite trips started exactly this way — a $180 return flight to Lisbon appeared when we were just browsing on a slow afternoon. It will help you get cheap flights.
7. Mix and Match Airlines
A return ticket with one carrier isn’t always the cheapest option. Try booking your outbound and return legs separately with different airlines. Open-jaw routing — flying into one city and out of another — can also unlock cheaper combinations that a standard round-trip search won’t show you.
8. Shoulder Season Changes Everything
Peak season fares (Christmas, Easter, summer school holidays) are expensive because everyone wants to travel then. April–May and September–October offer dramatically lower airfare, thinner crowds, and often better weather. If your schedule has any give at all, this is the biggest single saving available.
9. The Hidden City Trick (A Word of Caution)
Occasionally, a flight with a layover at your actual destination is cheaper than a direct flight there — so you book the through-ticket and simply get off at the connection. It works, but it violates airline terms of service, only applies to one-way trips, and requires carry-on-only travel. Use sparingly.
10. Actually Sign Up for Airline Newsletters
Yes, they can be noisy. But airlines like Jetstar, AirAsia, and Ryanair send genuine flash sale prices — sometimes 30–40% below standard — to newsletter subscribers, often hours before deals go public. Takes 30 seconds to subscribe. Pays back fast.
Start Here
If you apply nothing else from this list, start with tips 1 and 4 — date flexibility and fare alerts. Together they do most of the heavy lifting. The other eight are bonuses that stack on top. Happy hunting.
