In this post I not-so-humbly bragged about finding (and immediately booking) a nonstop flight to Paris for $1 (plus an additional $640 in taxes). A few weeks before that, I booked a flight to Paris for a little over $700 total (nonstop on the way there, with a two hour layover at Heathrow on the way home). I thought I’d share my tips for finding good airfare deals, since I appear to be on a winning streak and a bunch of you expressed interest in how I snagged them. I wish there was some magical secret, or that airlines would lower their prices consistently with fuel prices, or at the very least that the basic economic principles of supply and demand didn’t really exist in this sector (there’s no reason the same flight to Paris in June should cost double what it does in March, just because more people want to go at that time of year, other than the fact that airlines are greedy mofos hellbent on making as large a profit as possible while screwing over the everyday passenger, and that is my manifesto against capitalism, the end.). But what my recent airfare scores come down to is persistence: a fair amount of website stalking, checking prices several times a day for weeks on end, and, unfortunately, luck. That $1 fare was gone an hour after I booked it, and if I hadn’t already gotten in the habit of checking frequently throughout the day, I would’ve missed it.
A word of warning: If you want to go to the Maldives and you live in Idaho nowhere near an airport, odds are it’s going to be expensive no matter what you do, so these tips might not prove to be too helpful. Sorry, kiddos! I’ve tried to make these as universal as I could.
So, here we go!