If you plotted our travel destinations on a map, you might think we just randomly select where we go next – but you’d be wrong. There is a method to the madness – and clearly it isn’t the closest country to us.
When picking a destination, flexibility is key. We have a long list of places we would love to visit, but some aren’t financially feasible for various reasons, so we just slide those locations in our back pocket for when the opportunity arises. Our favorite website to explore when we’re looking for a new place to visit is Kayak’s Explore page. We enter where we are and then can see the flight prices for all of the places we’d like to visit. We don’t stop there, though. Once we identify a few affordable locations from our travel wish list, we then go to Kiwi to see if it’s running any specials for those flights. Here are some deals I’ve gotten from Kiwi:
- Naples → Corfu for $36
- Corfu → Turin for $19
- Turin → Copenhagen $24
We’ll also take it one step further and cross reference those flight prices with the airline listed on Kiwi. We’ve found the flights can be similarly priced, but the airline will offer cheaper luggage rates – or even luggage specials.
When we’re exploring routes on Kayak, we take note of layover destinations. Many times, a popular layover destination happens to be on our travel wish list, and breaking up the flight also breaks up the price (and helps with battling our nemesis, jet lag). A version of this saved us over $200 when we were booking our flight from San Diego → Roatan, Honduras. We found the cheapest flight from the US to Roatan and then worked backwards finding the cheapest flight from San Diego to that location (which happened to be Miami).
Circling back to flexibility being key – we’re always open to delaying our travels by a few days in order to get the best flight price.
In our experience, there’s almost always a hack to be found to make flying more economically advantageous – you just have to know where to look.
WanderGays 