Ever wondered if you can fly to Asia for less than 100 euro? The answer is yes! In this post I am going to share some valuable tips and tricks on how to get the cheapest flight and how you can board an airplane being sure that you did not pay too much for your flight!

People often ask me: how do I find those cheap flights? Well my first answer would be: be flexible and wait for a nice deal or errorfare to come up. But you can not always wait around for an Errorfare to appear. So therefore, in this post I will explain how I normally look for flights and share some insights, tips and tricks and close off with a look to my article about flying to Asia for less than a hundred euro.

I will start the article with some general information and tips and an example how price tracking can save you 50%! After that I will focus on my favorite, and for most of you unknown, tools for finding prices: Google flights and fare finders. And I will finish with some strategies for short and long flights as well as some more tips on cheap flights, including a list of low cost routes that can get you, for example, to Australia for 220 euro!

General info and tips
Flexibility is key when looking for flights, if you cannot be flexible with your destination, try to be flexible with your dates, if you cannot be flexible with your dates, try to be flexible with your departure airport etc.

Use a tool to track prices (especially if the date is still in the future). If you track prices you get notified when the price drops or rises. This can be very helpful for all kind of flights (low cost and traditional flights) as airline prices are very volatile and jump up and down ALL THE TIME! Be willing to wait a few weeks and analyze the prices and when you notice a nice drop (for example because of a promotion at the airline jump on it and book it!). Another tactic, which works suprisingly well during peak season travel, would be to wait until the date gets nearer and airlines notice their planes are not full yet and thus drop the prices. Ryanair does this all the time. When their summer flights are bookable the prices are relatively high in the beginning, but when they notice that the flight is not full yet they will lower the price to hopefully sell those empty seats.. A practical example is when I tracked a Ryanair flight from Krakau to Eindhoven which dropped from 83 euro to 46 euro in a few weeks time. I was tracking the 1pm Ryanair flight and also got some other options to compare:

As can be seen, I receive an e-mail when the price changes for the exact same flight! This price drop happend over the last two weeks, but I had to wait a few weeks before the price started to drop!

Another thing to keep in mind are promotions. Airlines often run sales, sometimes announced and sometimes unannounced. KLM has their Werelddeal weken sale which is a popular sale where flights to all over the world go on sale for great prices! Popular destinations are the Dutch Carribean Islands, for example Curacau, as well as USA cities.

TIP: promotions differ by country as well do prices. If you live in the Netherlands you can still use a promotion aimed for the German or Scandinavian market. KLM is an airline that highly depends on transferring passengers and thus filling up planes with connecting passengers is more valuable for them than filling up the SAME plane with a Dutch passenger. This often means that flying with KLM from Düsseldorf, Brussel or Copenhagen can save you hundreds of euro’s.

Fare Finders
This is a nice tool that can be used if you want to travel on specific dates or somewhere between a specific period but are flexible regarding your destination or departure airport. Airlines offer these tools themselves, my favorite one is the one from Ryanair. I just fill in I want to leave from Eindhoven somewhere in July for 4-7 days and Ryanair gives me all the possibilities:

As you can see you can fly to a lot of nice places for under 50 euro ROUNDTRIP in July! It would cost a lot of time and effort to find these kind of deals yourself, therefore I love the fare finder as Ryanair does all the work for me!

Google flights
This is by far my favorite way to look for flights as it is gives me a lot of options in 1 screen. I love to use google flights when I am not too flexible where I want to go, but still flexible enough to compare multiple airports of departure and arrival.

Assume this example where I want to go to Spain for a few days mid July (peak season, summer) leaving either from the Netherlands (Ams, Ein, Rtm) or just across the German border (Cologne, Dusseldorf) and I am flexible to which Spanish city (Sevilla, Valencia or Alicante). It quickly shows me which dates are cheap and after I selected my desired dates it will show multiple possibilities, both from Cologne as well as from Eindhoven and Amsterdam. After that, it is up to me if the savings are worth the trip to Cologne or if I would choose a flight from a nearby airport like Eindhoven or Amsterdam.

This tool not only compares prices but it also gives information about legroom and on-time performace (the possibility your flight will be delayed!). Google flights is also the tool I use for tracking prices as I showed you in the KRK-EIN example.

Other strategies and tips
I will now share some insights in the difference of booking low-cost tickets and traditional tickets, as well as a great tip for long haul travel!

Low Cost: low cost or no frills airlines, such as Ryanair, Wizzair and EasyJet entered the European market in 2000’s with a brilliant model: only pay for what you need. This means that the base fare is very cheap, but for additional services they charge you extra. Want to check a bag? Reserve a window seat or even be able to bring your carry-on onboard rather than checked at the gate? You pay extra. If you don’t need all of this, low cost tickets are most probably the cheapest way of travelling and often your train ride to the airport is more expensive than your flight!

Traditional airlines: these airlines are the flag carriers like KLM and British Airways. They normally fly to and from the main airports, such as Schiphol instead of Eindhoven. What I like about them is that they offer multiple flights a day so you can choose your preferred time slot and to top it off they can have free drinks and snacks on board.

How to book these low cost tickets?
For low cost airlines ALWAYS use their own website for the best price. The same ticket on ryanair.com is cheaper than on vliegtickets.nl!
Something good to know for low cost tickets is that two one way flights are definetly NOT more expensive than a roundtrip flight. This gives you the opportunity to fly outbound with Ryanair and inbound with Easyjet, for example! Look around and compare multiple routes and airlines!

For traditional airlines it is the other way around. You need to shop! Some websites offer a better deal than the airline itself! You can use Skyscanner and Google flights to compare the different options! Also the other way around for these tickets: roundtrip flights can be cheaper than a one-way flight! For KLM for example it is sometimes cheaper to book a roundtrip flight and only use the first flight than booking a one-way flight.

TIP: consider the price difference for a low cost flight compared to a traditional flight. If you need to spend 25 euro on a long train ride to get to the city center, pay for your luggage and want to eat and drink something during your 4-hour flight it might even be cheaper (and more convenient) to choose for a traditional (for example KLM) flight rather than a low cost (Ryanair) flight!

TIP: if you are not in a rush and willing to see multiple places, why not linking two low cost tickets? First fly to Budapest and then fly to your favorite Greek island from Budapest rather than an overpriced peak-summer flight from Amsterdam!

Long haul
With long haul flights I mean flights to another continent, like Europe to the USA or to Asia. Since a few years low cost airlines started flying long haul as well and this opened a lot of doors for travelers like me. It now became possible to fly for cheap across the Atlantic or even to Asia! I am now going to share a small list with low cost airlines and routes I find useful if you want to fly long haul low cost!

Norwegian: this airline flies low cost from Amsterdam to New York, from London to Miami, Boston and many more destinations starting at 89 euro! They also offer flights from Buenos Aires and Singapore. Keep an eye on their promotions!
Wow air: this is a so called super low cost airline (you literally have to pay for everything, including hand luggage). But they offer flights to the USA from Amsterdam, Dusseldorf and Brussel for less than 200 euro roundtrip
Wizz air: this is a well-known low cost airline on the European market, but did you know they also offered flights to Dubai, Russia, Georgia and even Kazachstan?! They have a lot of possibilities from their hubs at Budapest, Sofia and Katowice.
Eurowings: this German airlines flies all over the world from Cologne and Dusseldorf, including Bangkok, Mauritius and Cuba starting at 160 euro one way!
Scoot: this is a relatively new airline flying out of Singapore. Did you know they have flights from Berlin and Athens to Singapore or Sydney? A one-way flight to Australia starts at just 220 euro!

TIP: combining low cost flights! These kind of tickets give you the chance to both fly very cheap AND to visit multiple places in one trip! Wanna know more about this tactic and how it works in real life? Read more about it in my blog “how to fly to Asia for under 100 euro?“

TIP: always collect miles in frequent flier programs, they can be VERY useful! Myself I collect with KLM, using a credit card which gives me 1 mile per euro spend. Also with British Airways and United I am collecting frequent flier miles. 3 Intercontinental roundtrips on BA earned me over 20.000 miles, enough for a round trip flight to Asia!

Note that this post has been written from my perspective where I live in the Netherlands, but all these tips work for any European country and most of them also for places outside Europe. There is so much more I can tell about cheap flights and tactics to use, but I will leave that for another time! I hope I gave you some new insights and useful tips! Much more to come, so keep an eye on my site!

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