Return to Home Page

November 10, 2009

More ways to score a better deal on plane tickets

by_melloveschallah_flickrThe biggest single expense for most trips abroad is generally the plane tickets. Whether you buy a round the world ticket or piece together a series of plane flights yourself, the tickets will likely be your biggest expense.

That’s why it makes sense to be come something of a discount airline guru. We’ve pointed out some helpful websites to save you money in the past, but it never hurts to add a few more to your bookmarks.

The most recent site I stumbled across is Tripeedo, which is an aggregator of aggregator sites like Orbitz, Expedia and others. The nice thing about Tripeedo isn’t necessarily that it’ll find you the best deals, but that it saves you time by searching across all the different large scale price aggregators at once.

But of course price aggregators generally won’t discover the best deals — too many budget airlines simply aren’t listed in the big sites like Orbitz. In fact, visiting individual budget airlines sites and even calling the airlines themselves almost always yields the best prices in my experience.

If you don’t want to take my word for it, check out this video from Adam Baker, who runs Man Vs Debt. Baker’s site a great resource for those of you in the planning stage of long trip. There are plenty of budgeting tips and ways to save your pennies for a long vagabonding trip around the world.

In this video Baker walks you through the process of using a number of websites to get a plane ticket for $571 less than the best price on Expedia and its ilk. The video is a bit long, but if you really want to save money on plane flights it does take a bit of time and effort. That might sound like a drag, but think of it this way: the money you save now will give you more time abroad.

The full post on Man Vs Debt also contains some tips for saving money when you arrive at your destination. Most of it will likely be familiar to Vagablogging readers — tips like couchsurfing.com, working on a farm or house sitting — but there are a few other tips worth checking out, like how to find better hostel deals, tapping into your social network and the joys of public transportation abroad.

If you’re interested in finding some more online travel resources, check out Wise Bread (another “frugal living” site) which has a great roundup of useful, money-saving travel links.

And, as always, if there’s a killer site you think we should know about, be sure to post it in the comments.

Posted by | Comments (3) 
Category: Air Travel, Travel Bargains


3 Responses to “More ways to score a better deal on plane tickets”

  1. Hans Says:

    Instead of trusting on technology, you can let real-life persons do the flight searching for you on Melookyoubook.co.uk. This is especially handy when you’re thinking about flying (halfway) around the world and you have no idea which budget airlines operate in e.g. South-East Asia or Africa.

  2. Derek C Says:

    Nice post. I hadn’t heard of tripeedo and I’m sure I’ll end up using that in the future.

    I wanted to submit a different method which is actually taking the most expensive portion of my RTW trip and making it nearly free. Around 4-5 months ago I began avidly ready the FlyerTalk forums and discovered a wealth of knowledge regarding obtaining frequent flier miles for free (with a little effort). Since that date, I have already received more than enough miles to pay for all of the major flights on my trip. For the smaller flights, I’ll still use local low cost carriers so I don’t waste valuable miles on flights I could purchase cheaply.

    I noticed that the Man vs Debt site actually mentions this and links to Chris Guillebeau’s new ebook that details this strategy. Honestly I wish I would have thought about this earlier and written it myself. I did complete a mini-writeup which I posted on the RTW bootsnall and lonely planet thorn tree forums. I haven’t personally read the ebook but I’m sure all the info is scattered throughout the FlyerTalk forums.

    Anyways, just wanted to put it out there as I have already booked the first flight of my trip for the low price of $10, with many more to come.

  3. November Man Vs. Debt Recap! | Man Vs. Debt Says:

    [...] Vagabonding.net shares my Travel Hacking Video with their [...]

Leave a Reply

Main

Bio

Books

Stories

Essays

Video

Interviews

Events

Images

Writers

Marco

Guide

News

Paris

Vagabonding.net

Contact

Marco Polo Didnt Go There
Rolf's new book!


Vagabonding
   Vagabonding


RECENT COMMENTS

Joel Carillet: Thanks for the comments, everyone. I especially appreciated the...

Simone: Thanks for sharing, Rolf! At the time, was it unusual that Salon published you,...

Jo: Solo is best. Been doing it on and off for 40 years. My daughter says with a friend...

Rebecca Travel-Writers-Exchange: “What goes around comes around,” seems to...

Joey D: @Van the devil was not always thought to be evil. In Ezekiel it is actually...

Natalia: This has been one of favourite books of the past twelve months, and I have...

Lisa Edmondson: Nice idea! My first baby, my little girl, studied every new object...

Sabina: Good for Sullivan McLeod! What would I do? I think almost nothing is...

sam fox: Im 14 yrs old and already plan on being a traveling journalist. I have already...

Rebecca Snavely: Wonderful post! And it reminds me so much of the movie...

SPONSORED BY :



CATEGORIES

TRAVEL LINKS

ARCHIVES

RECENT ENTRIES

Spring festivals in the Caribbean and Latin America
Tokyo’s ancient eco past
Babies: a reason to travel
Resiliency in the face of tragedy
The initiation rites of travel
When you don’t have any experience, do it anyway
Men and women get different diseases while traveling
Volunteering at home
Travel and home are invariably intertwined
BootsnAll Announces New Platform for Travel Writers


Subscribe to this blog's feed
Counter