Find cheap flights – Last minute travel

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In this post, we show you effective techniques to find cheap flights, especially when it comes to last minute travel. We have helped several of our friends, relatives and colleagues over the years to save a ton of money on international and domestic flights. So, here we are to share it with you and the world!

One might ask, “why even bother, just Google it”. Most of us are so used to “googling” for everything, we hardly even think anymore. Our opinion is that there are alternative approaches and we would like you to explore them.

We will, for example, take up a scenario of last minute travel. Below are some of the ways, we would recommend approaching the last minute travel, especially domestic ones. International travel has a few other ways, but we will focus on the domestic travel for now.

1. Talk to a local travel agency: Surprisingly, this old (pre-Internet) profession still seem to work effectively. Keeping a list of good local travel agencies is always a smart idea. In U.S. alone, there seem to be around 14,000 travel agencies still helping people save money.You can look into Yellow Pages for a near by travel agency firm, and then look them up on Yelp to quickly gain some perspective on their history and customer service etc. You may look up online travel websites to look up and cross verify pricing, but agents are able to provide you a personalized service addressing your specific seating, food, number of stops (lay over) and other preferences. I have also looked up Better Business Bureau website to cross check the travel agent’s background and ensure that they have a good standing history. Other forms of this approach also include, and most cases require memberships, is contacting AAA Travel desk, Costco Travel, etc. and ask them for deals around your destination/dates.
2. Search for cheap flight tickets online:  mass search engines such as Kayak, expedia, orbitz, travelzoo etc, and of course Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. for “last minute deals” or “last minute cheap flight tickets” for your destination. Most of the travel aggregation services web sites also have a toll-free number that you can dial in to talk. Other websites that seem good, but we have no direct experience with these: lastminute.com and lastminutetravel
3. Contact airline: Directly contact airlines (either through their websites or calling their 1-8xx numbers)  such as southwest, American Airlines, Jet Blue etc, as some of these airlines exclude themselves from popular travel search engines, so it is not recommended to purely rely upon the online travel website search engines.
4. Other usual tricks: Flying in odd hours, shifting dates, looking for online coupon codes, having long lay overs (more # of stops), travelling to alternative destinations etc will give you some additional reduction in price as well, but they are sometimes a hassle.
5. Frequent flyer program: If you are already part of an airline and you have some miles accumulated on your Frequent Flyer miles then look up the customer service, they may have some offers or may be able to hook you with a partnering airline.

We will be discussing other scenarios that help you find cheap flights, in the upcoming episodes!

We hope you enjoyed reading and find it beneficial! If there are techniques that worked for you the most, and you would like to share with us, we will happily publish it here .

If you like our approach and the content, please help spread the word by including a link to this article in your blog post or send it to others by email or tweet it!

Happy Flying!

Sally McFly