More ways to score a better deal on plane tickets

The 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.