Tips & Tricks to Save on Your Next Vacation 💰

Top Flight Hacks

Looking to bag cheap flights for your next trip? We've compiled our top tips for finding the best value flights, including the strategies we use here at TravelPirates to provide the best flight deals each day.

Flexibility

Dates:

We know this one isn’t always possible, but the difference a day or two can make on flight prices can be huge. This can be due to a particular airline operating on certain days of the week, demand, the flight time and various other factors.

Kayak has a +3 days flexibility option. Below is an example for a one-way flight from New York to London. Flying on the Saturday costs $189 and flying just a day earlier costs over double!

Destination

If you're really on the hunt for cheap flights, it pays to be flexible with the destination too. You can use Kayak explore to see a world overview of the cheapest flights from your departure airport, once you click the destination you'll be shown which dates are the cheapest to travel on too.

You can either look at any date, a particular month or exact dates. This is a good option if you can't be flexible on dates but are open to try a new destination.

Clear your destination option in the search bar:

Hit the search icon and you'll see the following pop up:

Then you can scroll around the globe and pick a destination!

Book Last Minute

Airlines want their seats filled since the plane is going regardless. So if the seats aren't filled by a few weeks before departure, you'll often find some massively reduced rates.

Break Up the Journey

If you're looking for a long-haul flight, you might find the direct (or even indirect) prices to be mega expensive.

One of our favorite Pirate tips is to check out the cheapest indirect route and see where the layover is. Instead of booking this route, check if it's cheaper to book return flights to the layover destination and return flights from there to your final destination. You can leave a day or two in between too, which means no long airport stopover and getting to explore two places in one!

One great example of this, is the crazy fares we see from Hawaii to Australia. It's actually cheaper to fly to Hawaii round trip and then add another round-trip flight from Honolulu to major Australian cities like Melbourne or Sydney.

Tips for Booking Hotels at the Best Rates

Be Thorough:

Search for deals using several different OTAs (online travel agencies); this ensures that you can do a proper price comparison for the available cheap hotels at your destination. You'll often see us use the Trivago OTA. We love Trivago because they show the lowest fares with third party websites along with the hotel's website.

Sign Up to Hotel Loyalty Programs:

Many hotel groups have their own loyalty programs. Most are free to join and give you access to benefits like discounts and members-only rates.

Search for Coupon Codes:

Google is your friend. Enter the name of the OTA you want to book with, followed by “discount code”, “promo code” or “coupon code”.

Be the First to Hear of Hotel Sales:

If you have a favorite hotel group or property, sign up to their newsletter and follow their social media accounts to make sure that you hear about new sales.

Book out of Season:

It may be tempting to only consider a summer vacation, but traveling out of season guarantees that your hotel price will be much, much cheaper.

Use Air Miles:

You may not yet be aware of it, but you can choose to use your airline miles for booking hotels too.

Affordable Destinations for Your Next Vacation

Below, we've compiled a list of affordable destinations to visit. Several factors are taken into consideration when determining what makes the destination affordable, if flights are affordable and affordable accommodation can be found.