In the post about 10 tips to save money while travelling as a couple, we have mentioned that booking the flights at good timing is very important. How can you save even more money on flights than when comparing with Skyscanner?
The key for this hack is to use data! In 2023 there are so many flights a day worldwide. That gives room for many useful data points.
And google (https://www.google.com/travel/) of course has this data and you can access it. Now you just need to know how to take advantage of it. It basically has the same functionalities as Skyscanner plus a little bit of extra ones. You can very fast search the price per day in the calendar of the entire year instead of just going month by month for example. See the example below for the flights from Seoul to Chiang Mai.
Moreover, it tells you whether this flight is cheap or now according to the dates in which you’re searching and it even tells you specifically how much cheaper or expensive is the flight on these days compared to all the data they have in their servers!
That’s a really useful piece of information. If you know that the flight is now much more expensive than what it usually is you can check why. you can go into the offer and check which airlines are offering the flight these days and which airlines used to offer the flight connection before and compare. In case the low cost airlines didn’t yet list the price you can wait patiently until they do so ;) In fact you can passively wait by turning on notifications on google flights for when the price changes!
Let’s give an example:
Our direct flight from Seoul to Chiang Mai during the light festival (in peak season) was costing about 900€ when booking it 1 year in advance. But a quick glampse at google flights on previous months allowed us to see that some low budget companies like JejuAir were offering the same flight for 300€. When looking at the Jeju Air website you could see that they were just not offering flights 1 year in advance but only from 5 months in advance so it was worth it to wait to see whether the same flights would be listed. Without google flights, we would have just took the 900€ flight spending 1200€ extra on our trip! So it was definetely worth the wait :)
In the example above you saw prices for July that are all above 700 and in August even above 870€.
However, you see that the only airline offering that flight is Korean Air. Similar to our case, Jeju Airlines (the budget airline from Korea) didn't publish yet the rates for summer 2024. So you can wait and expect to have prices of about 300€ instead of 870€.
I hope these tips might help you on your future plan of trips!
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