Here are the websites and services I use to find bargain international flights.
Experts predict a golden age for bargain international flights once we emerge from the pandemic. (I’m talking roundtrips to Europe for $350 and Asia for $500.) How do you find them?
Here’s the process I’ve developed over the years to find cheap or mistake fares.
When I decided to ramp up my international travel eight years ago, I discovered there were a number of finder sites that post (via Twitter, Facebook, and/or email subscription) international flight deals (usually roundtrip economy). You can subscribe to most of the sites for free. (They make their money through advertising or commissions when a flight is booked through their suggested providers.)
I started out making a Twitter list of a half dozen sites. The feed quickly became overwhelming—there were so many flights from so many locations I wasn’t interested in (no matter how cheap it is, I don’t want to fly from Addis Abba to Azerbaijan) and the feed was very repetitive (the sites often found the same deal or copied from each other, with and without attribution).
After a few days of this I narrowed my list to the sites I thought were the best: The Flight Deal (has the most deals), Fare Deal Alert (only posts deals from ten airports, including my home base of Denver), and Secret Flying (for their round-the-world, round-Europe, and round-Asia itineraries). The offerings became more manageable, but still there were irrelevant departure airports and deal repetition.
I next tried several OTAs (online travel agencies) and aggregator sites, which collect and publish all the deals from a variety of sites. I chose one that allowed me to tailor my subscription to my origin airport(s), destination preferences, and how often I wanted to receive an email. It also validated with flight booking engines that the flights were actually bookable at the claimed rate and, if so, on which dates the fares were available.
This eliminated the problems of the Twitter list, but created a new obstacle: the feed was a little slow. That is, I was seeing deals minutes or longer after the subscribers to the sources sites were.
At some point during this process, I realized I prefer to be inspired by a deal rather than the other way around. Show me Chicago-Madrid $1025 RT in business class departing six months from now and I’ll jump on it, then build the rest of my itinerary. Much preferable to coming up with an itinerary on my own, then inputting destination-date combos into an OTA/aggregator or a price-tracking app like Hopper and hoping to find a bargain.
Given that, I decided to sign up for a paid subscription service: Scott’s Cheap Flights. While SCF offers a free feed like other sites do, I chose to go the paid (“premium”) route because:
-I can specify my departure airport (e.g., Denver), rather than just a region of the country (free subscribers)
-I receive deals thirty minutes before free subscribers do
-I see all the deals; free subscribers only receive a third of them
It’s been well worth the cost: over the past four years, I’ve saved close to $14,000 in airfare costs, primarily on international economy flight deals. (I tend to redeem points for business and first class flights.)
How does Scott’s Cheap Flights work?
SCF searches for flight deals, focusing on international fares, mostly in economy class. Timing varies with each deal, but most alerts are for travel 2-8 months in the future.
Like the other sites, in addition to identifying the route, Scott’s Cheap Flights also tells you the cheapest way to book the flight. Sometimes it’s only available with a promo code through an airline’s website, other times it’s cheapest to go through an online travel agency (OTA). As SCF makes its money from premium subscribers, it won’t send you to a more-expensive website to book your flights in order to earn a higher commission as some of the other sites do.
For this same reason, Scott’s Cheap Flights is only going to send out a flight deal when it’s really a deal. That’s why SCF can brag subscribers save an average of $550 a ticket. I receive notice of one to two deals per week on flights departing from Denver airport.
Free subscribers can specify which region of the country they want to receive deals from. If you live in Phoenix, you may not mind hopping over to Los Angeles for a deal. But it probably isn’t worth it to buy a separate flight to San Francisco to save a couple hundred bucks. SCF recommends keeping all regions selected at first to see what kind of deals are sent out, so you’ll have an idea which regions you might want to specify.
If you decide to go premium, the fee is $49/year, with a 30-day 100% moneyback guarantee.
Yes, many of the deals Scott’s Cheap Flights posts can be found on other flight deal websites. Sometimes SCF will find the deal first, while other times SCF will alert readers about a deal after it’s popped up elsewhere. That said, SCF’s ability to send instant email alerts and being able to designate my departure airport(s) were why Scott’s Cheap Flights ended up as my source of international flight deals and one I am happy to pay for.
I also subscribe to the premium service offered by Thrifty Traveler ($5/month or $45/year) because it seems to find a lot of international economy deals originating from Denver. (Note: I tried the popular Dollar Flight Club—it has two Premium paid options; one for domestic deals, the other adds in international bargains, too—but it didn’t fit my needs.) I suggest you test-drive a paid site by subscribing to either its free services or its free premium trial period to see if it offers the type of flights you are looking for.
Finally, remember to book first and think later; if you see a cheap fare, jump on it. Thanks to DOT regulations, any flight on any airline (domestic or foreign) can be canceled without penalty within 24 hours after the reservation is made as long as the ticket was booked directly with the airline (or certain booking engines, such as Priceline) at least one week prior to the flight’s departure. So if I see a great fare, I often book several travel dates, knowing I have 24 hours to see if any fit my schedule, work with hotel availability, etc.
Happy hunting!
Twist’s Take: Planning an international trip? A paid airfare-search service is probably worth trying out. Scott’s Cheap Flights is where I usually find cheap international economy flights I end up booking. At $49/year, the premium subscription ends up paying for itself. I also subscribe to Thrifty Traveler’s premium service at $45/year because it finds a lot of deals from my home airport. If you don’t want to go the paid route, I recommend subscribing to The Flight Deal (and Fare Deal Alert if they cover your home airport) as a source of bargain airfares.
