Tip 1: Sign yourself up to Price Alerts
An easy way to find Skyscanner’s cheap flights is to sign up for Price Alerts and let the tracker do the hard work for you. Set a Price Alert and you’ll get an email immediately if there’s a drop in the flight price, and you won’t be caught out if the price suddenly increases.
It also lets you monitor the price history for a selected flight so you can quickly spot if the price is dropping (or increasing) and get the best cheap flight available.
Read more: Do browser cookies increase the price of flights?
Tip 2: Use Month View
This tool is a favorite of many a savvy traveler. If you’re more concerned with finding a cheap flight than traveling in a particular month, this search option is a total winner. By selecting “Whole Month” in the ‘To’ box in a Skyscanner flight search, you’re allowing us to search the cheapest flights across a whole month (or year if you select “Cheapest Month”).
Want to know more? Read this: How to find the cheapest flights across a whole month
Tip 3: Sign up to email alerts from your preferred airlines
Last-minute cheap flights can be difficult to find, but it’s definitely easier if you know where to look. It’s made much easier if you visit some of your favorite airlines and sign up for their newsletters. You’ll hopefully soon be receiving lots of flash sales, special introductory rates, information on new routes, and of course cheap fares on last minute flights and last minute holidays.
Some people also think Tuesday afternoon is the best time to bag a cheap flight because most airlines will know at this point whether their weekend flights are already fully booked. If there’s lots of empty seats, they might send their subscribers an alert pointing them to a bargain flight!
Always looking for a bargain? Sign up to Skyscanner’s Newsletter below and get the best deals straight to your email.
Tip 4: Be disloyal
There are two approaches when it comes to choosing airlines to travel with: remaining loyal to one and building up loyalty points, or playing the field in order to just find cheap flights.
By searching on Skyscanner rather than spending hours on individual airline websites, you can find the best deals regardless of the airline, or whether you’re flying in with one and out with another. We still recommend you sign up to loyalty schemes but the savings by being flexible can be well worth it.
Tip 5: Use the clever Map View
This is another favorite for travelers just looking for the best cheap flights out there. If you know where you want to travel from, but not to, use Map View. In the top right of the search box on Skyscanner.ae you’ll see ‘Map’.
Click on ‘Map’ and enter your departure airport and month you want to travel. Then you’ll see routes and prices all over the world. You can also filter the results by price and non-stop flights. Hover over any red or green dot and you’ll be shown the price of the cheapest flight available.
Tip 6: Pick your credit card wisely
There are lots of UAE banks offering credit cards that give you airline loyalty points or Air Miles ME points, so choose wisely when signing up. Some of them also offer free travel insurance as a bonus.
A credit card that gives you air miles can be useful for day-to-day purchases but be very careful about the country’s strict debt laws and never spend more than you can afford. If you shop around and spend cleverly you could earn yourself points towards a long-haul flight or an upgrade on a shorter flight.
Tip 7: Check out the Best Time to Book data
You can’t argue with data. At Skyscanner.ae we’ve done some serious number crunching to identify the best time to book a flight to get the best deal. Our number crunchers analyzed thousands of historical flight bookings leaving from the UAE to the most popular cities to identify when you should book your flight if you want to bag a bargain.
It also allows you to see the cheapest month to travel to a particular destination at the click of a button. Useful, right?
Tip 8: Buy a one way ticket to your destination (and back)
Sometimes it’s not worth buying a return flight, but instead choosing two one way tickets (these can be from different airlines). You might find a cheap flight and more flexibility by shopping around. It also means you could fly out of a different airport to the one you arrived in, which is great if you’re on your annual trip home and covering a large stretch of country.
If you’re planning to visit the same country regularly, you could also check the prices for a one way ticket for the outward journey, and a return ticket for the return and the following outward leg.
Read more: Looking for multiple flights? Try Skyscanner’s multi-stop flight search tool
Tip 8: Use Explore in Skyscanner App
If manually hunting for Skyscanner’s cheapest flights sounds too much like hard work (FYI, it’s not!), head over to the app. Go to the Explore section on your Skyscanner app and simply put in your destination. Skyscanner will give you the cheapest flights available and you can choose to specify the length of your trip and direct/non-stop flights.
*This article was updated in May 2019. Information and prices correct at the time of publication but may be subject to change.
