How to find the best flight deals for 2022/2023
How to find the best flight deals in 2022
The last few years have certainly been interesting in the airline industry. From being able to score flights for almost nothing March – June of 2020 and consistently low rates on most international routes until March of 2022; inflation, a surge in domestic travel, and continued staffing shortages have led to sky high fares, reduced route availability, and a severe decline in customer service on most airlines.
Luckily, it is still possible to find cheap flights in 2022 utilizing the right tools.
The best way to find cheap flights for several years now has been Google Flights. When it comes to search flexibility, Google Flights has a ton of great features to be able to help you find the flights that best work for your schedule and budget.
The key to finding the absolute best rates on flights has always been flexibility, but in 2022 with extremely high flight prices, this is more important than ever. For example, say you want to go to Europe in the fall of 2022, but have flexibility on dates and destinations, you can use Google Flights to search a range of dates to all of Europe in one simple search. Start your search by entering origin city (if you are flexible on origin, you can also add multiple origin cities) as well as the area you are looking to travel to. For the destination, you can enter a region, a country, a city, state, or even leave destination blank to see all destinations. At this point you will need to put in specific dates, but you will change that on the next page.
Once you initiate the search for specific dates, you can search by month, for a duration of a weekend, one week or 2 weeks by clicking on the calendar in the date field, and then selecting flexible dates.
From here, you can select a time frame of anytime in the next 6 months or search by a specific month. For this example, we will search for a 1 week trip in November of 2022 from Chicago to anywhere in Europe.
This will give you a map of destinations and pricing for different periods of a 1 week trip.
Here you can use the filters to narrow down your search by airlines, number of stops, price, etc.
Filtering for all flights under $550, here is how the results are displayed.
Clicking on a specific city will show dates and airlines for these lowest prices. Clicking on Milan, I can see the dates for these rates are November 5th – November 12th on TAP.
From here you can click on the lowest rate (given it is an acceptable amount of stops and travel time) and be able to select an itinerary.
Here you can use the drop down on the specific flight to get all specific flight details such as layover information, flight times, aircraft, and more.
Once you select the outbound flight that works for you, it will then take you to return options. Sometimes, on international itineraries this will also provide codeshare flights on other airlines for similar prices.
Once selecting the return flight, you will be provided with booking options. Here you will also see a graph on the price history as well as price history of the flight and whether it is a deal, average price, or more expensive than normal. As you can see below, there are several options and prices when it comes to actually booking this flight. It is pretty much the rule among travel experts that booking direct with an airline is ALWAYS the preferred method of booking flights. Booking flights with OTAs (online travel agencies) is never worth the hassle if anything changes with your flight or you have an issue while traveling on the itinerary. There are specific instances where it may not be possible to book direct with the airline, but they are typically few and far between and usually an anomaly. If you click on the link to book with TAP, you will be taken directly to their website to be able to book the itinerary. And that’s it, you have likely found the best deals out there by simply using Google’s flight search function.
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