SAVE MONEY, TRAVEL MORE
Read our article for the 7 flight booking tips you should know. If you are planning a holiday, the first thing to do (after fixing the destination of course!) is booking the flights. Not just the first, it’s also the most important thing, as your flight expenditure will decide your holiday budget.
After travelling quite a bit in the last few years, we have gathered a few tips and made some mistakes. So, learn from our travel tips and be a smart flyer.
The 7 Flight Booking Tips for a Smart Flyer
- Open an account on Skyscanner. It’s a pretty cool app that gives you all the information on the latest flight prices around the world. Apart from that, it also tells you which months are the cheapest and which are the most expensive, to travel to that particular destination.
Check out the Skyscanner site here
- If you are travelling during the off season, book your tickets 8-10 weeks in advance. But, if you are travelling during peak season (December-February) make sure you get your bookings done as soon as possible, as peak season flight prices rarely come down.
- For all our travels using budget airlines with only hand baggage, we book extra luggage of around 25 kgs on my husband’s ticket, while my ticket has hand baggage only. We make sure that our luggage does not exceed that weight limit and put both our bags on his ticket.
This was what we did when we booked Air Asia flights to Bangkok and to Siem Reap. We saved the money we would have spent on my extra luggage charges and used it for souvenier shopping instead!
[irp posts=”155″ name=”Cambodia: why you need to go and all the info you need — The Compulsive Thinker”]
- If visiting multiple cities/regions in a country, book multi city flights. You may spend a bit more marginally but its highly convenient and time saving.
For instance, on our trip to Vietnam, we landed in Hanoi, but our return flight to India was from Danang.
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- This tip is very important. For any non direct flights/ multi leg flights, make sure both your flights have the same PNR number. Or else you will have to collect your baggage, apply for visa on arrival and check in your luggage again in the transit country, a very frustrating and tedious process.
As we had to do on our flight from Kolkata to Siem Reap (Cambodia) via Bangkok. We had to get our luggage, get our visa on arrival (costing us extra money) and go through the entire process of checking in again. All because my better half didn’t pay much attention to the PNR numbers while booking those flights. Now that’s one lesson we will never ever forget!
- Before booking domestic flights in any country, research the airlines and find out about its reputation. There are plenty of cheap airlines in every south East Asian country but many of these flights get rescheduled or cancelled.
It’s always better to book on a reputable domestic airline paying a bit extra and have that peace of mind.
We had to wait for hours in the Hanoi Domestic terminal as our Viet Jet flight to Danang kept getting delayed. We finally took off after 6 hours at the airport and had to continuously update our car service awaiting us . End result: Exhaustion and Frustration by the time we reached Danang.
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- Flights during odd hours (late nights etc) are usually cheaper than those on regular hours. If you are on a very tight budget, you can choose this option to save some money.
But, if this involves spending hours in the airport while you lose valuable holiday time, it’s just not worth it.
Find out transportation options from the airport to your hotel at such an hour. Keep safety in mind. If you need to make onward journey to another town/city, abandon this plan as it may not be safe or convenient to travel at such late hours. In such cases, if you have no other flight options, stay the night near the airport and resume your onward journey in the morning.
Our delayed flight from Danang had us travelling at night to Hue in a pre booked car service which was tiring and not something I would recommend ever.
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Last of all be prepared for every eventuality. Flight delays and cancellations are very common now a days. Keep a credit card in hand for any fresh booking you might need to make in case of cancellation. And never ever schedule any paid/booked tour plans on the day of your arrival. You never know what may happen.
Some additional useful tips suggested by one of my dear friends:
➡Avoid booking flights on public holidays
➡Try to book flights on Tuesdays/Wednesdays as these flights usually tend to be cheaper than those on Mondays /weekends
➡Try to book flights towards the end of the on season (for instance in late February/early march) when prices fall
Hopefully, you got some useful info from these 7 flight booking tips.
Happy Planning !
Read our 2 day itinerary for Hanoi ⤵[irp posts=”703″ name=”48 HOURS IN HANOI : CRAZY, CHAOTIC AND COLOURFUL”]
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Be a Smart Flyer : 7 flight booking tips you should know
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