Finding Cheap Flights
Those airlines, they always seem to be offering randomly expensive prices every time you check online for a flight. There are a billion tips and tricks out there for finding cheap flights, but I'm a loyal Kayak girl! Luckily I'm also a dweeby librarian so I have figured out all the filters for the search to make it easy to find a pretty decent price.
First start of using Kayak Explore (warning, slightly addictive). Set your home airport and see all the possibilities of flights leaving from there. You'll want to limit your price, then limit your season. Then, limit by activities or weather. Lately, the sea has been calling me home, so I would limit by beach in this instance. Be open minded! I am thinking about learning to surf lately, so I could really choose Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, South Africa, Florida, Mexico...whatever is cheapest.
Okay so now that you have some ideas of what areas are cheap, next look at Kayak.com for flights. Tips before you start:
-Bigger hub airports are cheaper. If you can get a Megabus to Chicago, New York, or another major hub, you'll likely save $300 or so. Think of that way when flying into a country as well. Can you fly into a bigger airport and get a local airline, bus, or train to the smaller town you want to get to?
-Cheapest days to fly are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays.
-Be flexible with your times to fly out. Yeah, no one wants to get on that 5am flight, but I'd rather save $150 and get up early.
So! Let's look at our limiters here. The yellow arrows are pointing at the home airport (bigger the hub the better), the +/-3 days button (if you are flexible with which days you fly out and return), and the include nearby button (sometimes a flight in a nearby airport is much cheaper).
Now we get to the results screen. There's the grid of the +/-3 days options, and you can scroll down below to see the prices. I just did a search from Columbus to San Juan. Keep searching with a few varieties on the left hand column or with different airports or dates, but make sure to clear your cookies and cache every once in a while or they'll start bumping the prices up.
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