You're Probably Searching Wrong
Most people search for flights the same way. Pick where you want to go, fix the dates, then see what comes up. According to Scott Keyes, founder of flight deal service Going (formerly Scott's Cheap Flights), that sequence is the most expensive way to do it. You end up treating price as the last thing you look at when it should be the first. His advice is to flip it: start by searching flights from your home airport with no destination in mind, see what's cheap, and then decide if any of those places interest you. It sounds backwards because it is backwards. That's the point.
In practice, this means opening Google Flights, leaving the destination blank, and hitting Explore. You'll get a map showing the cheapest places you can fly to from your airport. You can drag the map around, zoom into a region, and toggle between specific dates and flexible ones. If you choose flexible dates it will show you the cheapest prices for a weekend trip, a week, or two weeks, across the next six months. Skyscanner does something similar. Type "Everywhere" into the destination field and it ranks destinations by price. Nomadic Matt, who has been writing about travel for over fifteen years, starts all his searches on Skyscanner because it pulls in budget airlines and non-English booking sites that Google sometimes misses.
The two tools work differently and each has blind spots. Google Flights pulls pricing directly from airlines and some online travel agents using near real-time data, and it tells you whether the price you're seeing is low, typical, or high for that route. For complex international itineraries, especially ones involving smaller airports or a mix of low-cost carriers, Skyscanner often surfaces options that Google doesn't. Running both takes about ten minutes and has saved people hundreds.
When to Book
The Tuesday booking myth needs to die. Twenty-plus years ago, airlines used to load their schedules onto the internet once a week, so there might have been something to it. These days pricing algorithms work in real time. There is no magic day to click "book" and save money. What actually matters is how far in advance you're booking.
According to Expedia's 2025 Air Hacks Report, booking a domestic flight one to three months ahead can save up to 25 percent compared to last-minute. For international travel, the window stretches out further. Start looking at prices around six months out and try to book at least three months before you fly. For flights to Europe specifically, Google Flights data suggests the best deals tend to appear around 94 days before departure. After that, you're less likely to find a bargain.
The day you fly, on the other hand, does make a real difference. According to a 2025 Google report, the cheapest days to travel are Monday through Wednesday, roughly 13 percent cheaper than flying at the weekend. According to Expedia's 2026 report, Tuesday is usually the cheapest and least busy day to fly. If you want the emptiest plane possible, fly on a Tuesday in February. The reason is structural: business travellers tend to avoid midweek travel, so airlines price those seats lower.
One more thing on timing. If you can, book at least 21 days before departure. Airlines have pricing policies that substantially bump up fares inside that window. You can still find something after that point, but the odds are worse.
Let the Deal Choose the Destination
This is the mindset shift that separates people who consistently fly cheap from everyone else. Fixing your dates first and then searching for flights is almost always more expensive than doing it the other way around. Book the flight first. Hotels, accommodation, time off, all of that can come after.
In the US, the Department of Transportation requires all carriers flying to and from the US to allow free cancellation within 24 hours of booking, as long as the flight was purchased at least a week before departure. In the UK and EU, the rules are different. There's no universal 24-hour cancellation right, but many airlines offer flexible fare options, and package holidays booked through an ATOL-protected provider do come with a 14-day cooling-off period. Check the cancellation terms for whatever you're booking, but the principle holds: if a great fare appears, grab it first and sort the rest out after.
Alongside this, consider signing up for a flight deal alert service. These companies monitor thousands of routes and push alerts when a genuinely unusual fare appears. The main ones worth knowing about:
Jack's Flight Club is UK and Europe focused, with a free tier that sends one or two deals a week and a premium tier (around £39 a year) that sends significantly more, including mistake fares and weekend break deals. It has over two million members and is probably the best option if you're flying from UK or European airports.
Going (formerly Scott's Cheap Flights) is more US-focused, with a free tier and paid tiers from around $25 a year. Dollar Flight Club and Thrifty Traveler Premium do similar things for the US market.
Whether a subscription is worth it depends on how often you fly, but even one good deal a year usually pays it back.
Open-Jaw Tickets
A return flight to London and back from London is the most obvious way to book a European trip. It's also often not the cheapest or most efficient. An open-jaw ticket flies you into one city and home from another. So you fly into London, make your way to Paris by train or bus, and fly home from Paris. Your last day is spent in Paris rather than on a train back to London to catch your return flight.
Open-jaw tickets are priced as returns and in most cases cost less than buying two separate one-way flights. Airlines that operate from both cities, especially within the same alliance, tend to price these competitively. To book one, you don't need a special tool. On Google Flights, select "Multi-city" instead of "Round trip." Two sets of boxes appear. Fill in your home airport to city A for the first leg, and city B to your home airport for the second. You can add up to five legs if you're doing a bigger trip.
The same logic applies on the departure side. If your nearest airport is expensive but you live within a couple of hours of a bigger hub, you can book a cheap domestic or short-haul flight to get you to the airport where the deal departs from. These are sometimes called positioning flights and they can unlock fares that would otherwise be out of reach. You book them separately from the main flight and treat them as part of your travel day.
Mistake Fares
Mistake fares happen when something goes wrong in the pricing system. A dropped digit, a currency conversion error, a glitch that prices business class at economy rates. They're not common and they usually last only a few hours, but when they appear the savings can be absurd. Going.com tracked 16 mistake fares in 2025, more than double the year before, partly driven by AI pricing tools that glitch and new airline partnerships that miscommunicate.
To give you an idea: a mistake fare to Dublin in spring 2025 briefly had roundtrip fares that normally cost $800 or more going for under $150. Earlier that year, JetBlue forgot to add some fees, resulting in roundtrip fares from Boston and New York to Paris for $219.
If you spot one, the protocol is specific. Book immediately and directly through the airline's website if possible. Third-party sites have to communicate with the airline to finalise the booking, which gives the airline time to fix the error before your ticket is confirmed. Do not ring the airline to ask if the fare is real. You are essentially asking someone to look more closely at the mistake you're hoping they'll honour. Take a screenshot, wait, and don't book any non-refundable hotels until the booking has sat confirmed for at least two weeks. According to Jack's Flight Club, around 70 percent of error fares are honoured. Cancelling tickets is bad PR and a hassle, so most airlines just let them go. If yours does get cancelled, you get a full refund. The downside risk is low.
To catch them you need alerts, not manual searching. The communities worth watching: FlyerTalk's Mileage Run Deals forum, Reddit's r/flights, the Secret Flying website, and the deal services mentioned above. Jack's Flight Club and Going both flag mistake fares to their premium members.
Don't Over-Optimise
There's a version of flight searching that becomes a part-time job, and after a point the returns aren't worth the time. Set up price tracking on Google Flights for routes you care about. Check the Explore view once a week if you're mid-planning. Subscribe to one deal newsletter. Beyond that, you're just refreshing tabs and generating anxiety. The difference between a good deal and a perfect deal is usually about £30 and several hours of your life.