Every time I'm about to buy a plane ticket, I get anxious. Anxious I won't get the best price, anxious some sort of emergency will come up and I won't have the money, anxious I'll change my mind about going and anxious to see my bank account dwindle. Although I haven't been able to get rid of the anxiety of losing the money, I have found ways to find the best fares through a variety of options. Here are a few of the sites I use when looking for plane tickets. Most recently, I bought a plane ticket to North Carolina to visit friends on spring break and I visited every single one of these.
The first time I used Skyscanner was when studying abroad in Spain last year. The site lets you search for flights and see different prices through different companies and compare prices. I wasn't sure if you could use this to fly within the U.S., but turns out it's almost as good as Kayak.
Kayak is a lot like Skyscanner, except they show you a calendar with prices throughout the month before you even click search.
Out of the two sites, Kayak and Skyscanner, I recommend Kayak if you're in the U.S. and Skyscanner if you are in Europe and simply traveling throughout Europe. In the last couple of months, I've purchased both my tickets to NYC, Uruguay and North Carolina through Kayak because they offered me the best price and made searching easier.
STA is a student traveling website that offers trip ideas, student discounts, internship opportunities, volunteering abroad, etc. When I purchased my tickets to Spain, I purchased them through STA and got a student card to use for discounts while traveling. STA used to be available only to students, but the company recently changed it to include teachers and those under 26 years of age. Although most students might believe they're getting a good deal with these student travel sites, most of the time the tickets are more expensive than buying them through a regular company and if you try to change your flight, your dates are limited because not all flights have student seats available. I mention this from witnessing a friend having to leave Spain a month early and letting her Greece tickets go to waste. Not a good time.
Student Universe is just like STA, but less known.
Most people believe buying your plane tickets far in advance gives you the best deal. In reality, most of the time it doesn't make any difference. From experience, buying plane tickets Wednesday nights or Thursday nights are the best times and I tend to buy them two months before leaving.
Another thing to remember is to erase cookies from travel search sites when you're looking for plane tickets. If a site remembers what you've been searching, you might get skewed results.
Happy travels!
*If you fly with LAN, make sure to know at least some Spanish.
