International LDR all about plane tickets etc

[Alma]

Hey guys,

I thought it would be nice having a thread where all international LDR lovers can post...mostly where you buy your tickets (cheap tickets) and other information.

My question would be..how much do you always pay for your plane ticket?


Tickets for me are really expensive..about 700 € and more. Actually most plane tickets are only available for more than 800 €...this sucks.

So. I hope we can put some good information together!

[conejita_hada]

Are you looking to get information on how to get less expensive tickets for EU/US travel or just want to know the cost of travel to different countries?

[Alma]

well every kind of information is appreciated =)

But yes, I am mostly looking for information on how to get less expensive plane tickets. Problem is, the tickets seem to get more expensive hourly...

[Dziubka]

I don't think there's a trick.
I used kayak.com and checked for prices pretty much daily.
It could help if your SO checks as well. Sometimes for the same flight it would show different cheapest prices to my SO and to me. So maybe it depends on your location as well.

[Moon]

That price sounds about right to me, for summer travel I never pay less than $1000 for tickets to Helsinki. I can get them for much less for a winter trip. There really is no tricks for cheap tickets, they cost what they cost. Like Dziubka, I use Kayak as one of my engines for searching prices. I usually fly out of NYC instead of my home airport because it's usually a few hundred dollars cheaper, so maybe you could check other airports?

[TwoThree]

Edit: NVM, since it wasn't a general question.

[SaraHonRara]

I cant really say if it is true or not, but I have heard that if you open your browser in inkognito-mode that the tickets may be cheaper. Cause if you go into a site several times the apparently sets up the prices.

[GuineaPunk]

I think the best thing you can seem to do when it comes to getting cheap flights is be as super flexible as possible as to the time of year, and the time of day you want to go. When I first put my intended flight times into a price comparison site for my flight to Kenya back in December 2013 the cheapest price I got back was £1,400 (€1,765 or $2,365), ranging up to nearly £3,000 (€3,784 or $5,066)! I managed to halve that by playing around with the times and being flexible with my dates, as well as taking two flights rather than one.

I am not even close to being the best travelled person on this site, so please don't take the following as gospel, but by what travelling I have done (and the numerous hours I have spent searching for flight tickets in various circumstances) here are some of the things that have worked for me to bring the price down.

- Fly on a Tuesday, or a Wednesday, chances are that most people travel in neat clean weeks. They either want to arrive at the weekend, or just in time for it, so mid week isn't quite so popular.
- Fly out of season for the country you are visiting
- Take a the flight that you least want to take time wise. When I visited my boyfriend last December, I was at the airport at 3:00am on Boxing day morning.
- If you really want to save on your airfare fly Christmas day, so cheap! I couldn't quite go that far when saving my money, so I compromised and flew out the day after. Not many people want to fly Christmas day as they want to be with their families, so they have already got on a plane beforehand, but the airlines still want to keep their seats full. I flew via the Middle East, so it was still pretty full but the fares were great.
- Take a stop-over if you can bear the wait. I have no idea why, but covering a greater mileage on two planes, is cheaper than covering fewer miles on one . Obviously some people have to due to the overwhelming distance anyway, but those of us who have the luxury to pick a direct flight will save the pennies if we take an indirect one. Obviously these come from the sublime to the ridiculous, one search engine suggested I could go to Kenya via Russia to save £40, the saving wasn't worth the geography and the time.
- Comparison sites aren't always your friend. Just out of curiosity I looked on a couple of airlines websites to see what they would quote me, and quite a few actually came out lower than an equal search in expedia and other such sites.
- I have seen an online rumour that if you are a serial airfare searcher it is a good idea to clean out your cookies because the website remembers you have already searched and can put the prices up, so if you make it forget you will get lower prices. I have absolutely no idea whether this works or the technicality behind it, but I don't think it can do any harm.
- The earlier you book, the cheaper the flights, particularly long haul.

I'm currently looking into flights again (I did convince myself that I wouldn't visit him before he visited me, but I'm wavering ) and I have managed to find flights from Heathrow to Nairobi via Doha in Qatar (how I did it last time) with Qatar airways for £510 (€645 or $860) which is very good I think considering some of the fares I have come across.

[differentcountries]

I usually pay between 250 Euro and 600 Euro for tickets, I think that is quite fair, a ticket to my home town in Northern Norway will usually cost more! In Easter I paid 830 Euros for tickets (actually twice that ammount, since I payed for my student husband as well), I thought that was really expensive but we travelled short notice.

I usually travel Saturday to Saturday, that gives me a good price. Most people don't want to go/come on a Saturday, but I actuallly like having some time after/before work to unwind, plus it is cheaper. I get really stingy, also I have food allergies so sometimes I bring my own food on the plane (since also airport food cost a lot).

Actually, for me it is partly cheaper to fly IN season because then I can get direct flights (I don't have to pay extra to fly to the capital). This is not true for Easter...which I learned. But in summer, when I have a long holiday and can be flexible, it is very affordable to fly. Also, right after holidays it is usually very affordable. I fly agin this end of August, when main summer holiday is over, I got tickets almost as give away price. I have also gotten very cheap tickets early December, again because nobody is flying at that point. But it really depends, you have to check always. Here, any time before/during Christmas would be stupidly expensive to fly; people are always travelleing between families and job and new year. But no-one wants to fly on the 17th of May! (our national day) - so this year, I did that

I use lots of different search engines to get good prices, but I also use the internet sites of the flight companies - it really depends where the best prices are. This time I bought directly from the airline, as the search engines/internet travel companies had much higher prices. I try to pay by VISA for my tickets, but sometimes I use credit, which makes it cheaper than waiting until payday when the prices have risen.

Sometimes the search engines tell you to sleep at the airport or similar (even on trips that takes far less than a day) to get good prices - I have NEVER done that as I imagine the sleep would be horrible & I would be too afraid to miss my next flight. I did once arrive in his home town at 3 in the morning local time, I sort of had to because of work (complicated) but it made my first day much less pleasant than it had to, so I will probably not do it again. What I WILL do, is sleep on the plane back home, also I will wait any number of hours in any airport if that makes the airfare cheaper. I will bring my phone and books, and I will find ways to entertain myself.

[80anthea]

Like the others have said, check different airports. It's sometimes cheaper for me to fly into a further away airport and then get the Amtrak, obviously takes longer but is much much cheaper for me.


I usually pay around £700.

[Hollandia]

I find it cheaper when I fly in and out of hubs. It is all about flying when the airlines have the most seats available so the supply is higher, when the demand is high and supply is low, in non hubs airports you can sometimes get hit with higher fees. I also use Kayak and make my airport flexible and dates 1/3 +-, to find best rates then I use the calendar that pops up to change the dates again if needed to try to find the ultimate cheapest dates. You are also correct that searching without any history of previous cookies, or incognito can prevent them for raising rates on often searched routes. I tend to just remove my history completely which also works. I have been flying every couple of months for the last three years and IMO, the rates have indeed been going up. I could once get over from PHL to AMS for 800 Us dollars but now I can't find a trip under 1100 Us dollars most of the time and this is not even taking into account that the baggage fees are much higher in most airlines too. The more mergers that have happened the most it has been costing. I can assume they have yet again cut down on staff and how many flights are flying to each route and so have created that situation of high demand and low supply where people such as ourselves are forced to find a way to come up with the extra cash.

[Zapookie]

Yeah, try and fly into a bigger airport. My SOs town has a small airport, but tickets are ridiculously expensive to fly into it. It's cheaper for me to fly in to LAX and then drive an hour back into town.

For me, I usually buy my tickets about 2 months before I fly. I have been monitoring prices for a while now as I am due to go in October and the price has dropped significantly within the last month or so. You generally don't want to fly in summer or around christmas time. These are peak periods and prices are much higher. Feb-May, and then Sept-Nov are, IMO, the cheapest times of year to fly. It also depends where you are going. Travelling to a place in their winter can be cheaper.

I use skyscanner and STA travel.

[conejita_hada]

I don't know if it's specific to where I'm flying but I've found that the price goes down when I search in the mornings of the middle of the week for flights with dates in the middle of the week. So, I'll do the search on Tuesday to fly out on a Tuesday and it'll be a cheaper price than searching on a Friday for the same fly-out date (or a later fly-out date). But, flying to my SO's country is a pretty set price, just varies about $50 unless it's over major (Western) holidays. I also use LAX instead of my home international airport because it's cheaper and it's a direct flight.

[snow]

I cant really say if it is true or not, but I have heard that if you open your browser in inkognito-mode that the tickets may be cheaper. Cause if you go into a site several times the apparently sets up the prices.

I haven't tried that, but I tried deleting cookies and it was almost 90€ cheapter. It went from around 850 to 760, which, to me, is kinda a big deal.

[TwoThree]

Deleting cookies doesn't always work though. I tried it recently and it was definitely the same price. Sometimes that's just how things are.