Five Ways to Fly Cheap

Here's a list of five ways to fly cheap from CNN Money:

1. Fly during the slowest days of the week
2. Fly during the slowest time of the year
3. Fly to popular destinations at unpopular times
4. Buy during the cheapest times of the day
5. Buy a travel package, even if you don't need it

Let me summarize #1 through #3: be flexible. If you can be flexible in your travel arrangements, you can save a ton of money. When we went to Disney, we went in the off-season (still September), traveled on days most people didn't want to, and flew at times most people didn't want to. We capped it off by driving to an airport two-hours away versus flying out of the one that's 15 minutes from our house. The result? We paid less for four tickets than our friends did for one ticket flying in peak season at prime times.

Being flexible and traveling at non-peak times helps in other ways too: lodging, rental cars, and food are all generally less expensive as well because there's less demand. Better yet for our Disney trip, there weren't huge crowds at the parks. I think we waited 20 minutes for a ride at the most -- many waits we 10 minutes or less.

As far as #5 goes, you can get some great deals on packages, ignore part of them, and still save money on what you use versus what it would cost you to buy the usable portions elsewhere. We did this with Disney tickets. We bought packages and saved a bit (tiny) on the portion we did use.

Comments

[Darin H]

My wife and I just got tickets to fly home to NC from OR for Thanksgiving. Even though it's around the holiday, we're still pretty flexible on our travel dates. Most of the flights were going for $400-500 per person round trip. But I found some for under $200 if we flew out on Monday and stayed until the Wed after Thanksgiving, so that's what we're doing.