Booking a flight from the Middle East is easy these days, but it can become a challenging task if you cannot find the deal that you are looking for – specially if you have too many choices. The following travel tips will help you find the cheapest Economy Class ticket to your destination.
- Search for cheap fares on the airline’s official website. This is an often-overlooked tip, but well worth doing as airlines can host private sales that are only accessible through their website.
- Google Flights is a popular tool that has the potential to help you tremendously in finding the cheapest ticket. You just enter your travel dates and destination, hit ‘explore destinations’ and Google Flights shows you a map where you can travel for the lowest price.
- Search for the cheapest fare on the internet, and not through a travel agency as the latter will charge you a commission.
- Use the airfare search engine Kayak, our personal favourite. The latter checks the price of your requested flight at tons of sites at once, including Orbitz and Cheaptickets, and allows flexibility in your travel dates. However, Kayak does not display all prices, so do not forget to check other online ticket-sellers as well: Wego, Rehlat, Musafir, Skyscanner, Expedia, Cleartrip and Goibibo.
Subscribe to the newsletters of your preferred airlines, so that you will be informed amongst the first about their promotional offers (with sometimes discounts of 25%).
Buying Cheap Air Tickets
- Book your ticket on a Tuesday afternoon. A study by Farecompare found this was the best time to buy airline tickets as airliners most frequently release discounted tickets on Tuesdays.
- Travel outside the school holidays.
- Be flexible: adding a couple of days to your trip before or after peak travel days may lower the fare.
- Travel last-minute if you are very flexible in your travel plans. Airlines, especially charters, are known to cut prices when they can’t fill their planes for upcoming flights.
- Fly out early: the first flight of the morning is usually the cheapest.
- Fly for free by joining the loyalty program of an airline.
- Flying low-cost carriers can save lots of money but be very careful, as they may charge lots of hidden extras (making them not so low-cost after all), and they often fly to alternate, less convenient airports
- Including a Saturday night in your trip may substantially lower the price.
- Leave on a Tuesday or Wednesday as this is often much cheaper than leaving on the weekend.
- Book your ticket in advance, about six weeks for intra-continental and three months for inter-continental travel. You will likely pay a big premium for booking too late (within 14 days of your departure day), or for booking too early (more than 5 months in advance, except when you can make use of promotional offers).
- Fly different airlines. Most airlines now sell one-way flights at reasonable prices, meaning one airline might be cheaper for the outbound flight while the other works better for the return. You could even fly to one airport and depart from another.
- Consider booking an indirect flight to your destination. Direct or non-stop flights to your destination may be expensive, as some people will pay a premium for the convenience and there is little competition. Transferring is a time-consuming hassle, but it can save you a bundle, as there are many options and airlines are competing to undercut each other.
- Check alternate airports. If there is more than one airport near your origin or destination city, check them all (e.g. San Istanbul and Trabzon; Sharjah and Dubai; New York and Newark; Victoria Falls and Harare). Sometimes, alternate airports can be located a bit further away from your destination, but still be well-connected by public transport (e.g. Brussels versus Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt and Paris).
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