With only a month and a half left in Korea, I’m currently in prime travel-planning mode! I am very inspired by gurus like Nomadic Matt and Chris Guillebeau for travel-hacking and am always trying to learn from them as much as I can, but I’m definitely not at their level yet. That being said, I have discovered these two great websites that are helping me book cheaper travel recently.
Cheapoair
This website is awesome for a couple of reasons. My favourite feature is that they offer a “round-trip” search option that is actually a multi-city search. This means you can search for a one-way flight that stops somewhere else along the way, without paying more. Obviously this won’t be helpful for every kind of trip or travel plan, but if you’re looking at more long-term travel and one-way flights, this can be an awesome tool.
I’ll give you an example. When I booked my flight home from Asia to Toronto, I wound up booking a flight from Bangkok to New Delhi, with a “layover” for 6 weeks in New Delhi for my yoga teacher training, and then a flight from New Delhi to Toronto, all for the price of a flight from only New Delhi to Toronto on other search engines, or about $700 USD. Considering that a flight from Bangkok to New Delhi is about $150, I am saving at least that much overall.
I will say that in my experience there are a couple of downsides to this website. First, you sometimes have to do a lot of trial-and-error searches to find out which routes and airports will be cheapest for you. Second, I’ve had to make minor changes in my itinerary twice due to changes to my flights made by the airline, which is obviously not Cheapoair’s fault. Both times, Cheapoair let me know, sent me an email, and made it easy for me to switch to a different flight with only about an hour’s difference from my original itinerary.
Momondo
I absolutely love this flight search engine. It is modern, well-designed, clear, and easy to use with a lot of awesome features.
The best feature is their rating system for flights, where they compare price vs. flight length (including the number of layovers) and give you an overall rating out of 10 for any particular flight path.
There are lots of other features that I love as well. They show great graphs of price fluctuations for different days of the week and times of the year so you can more easily choose a cheap flight. They source flights from almost every airline, even the small budget airlines that don’t always come up in engines like Kayak (a site I also love, by the way!). When I booked my flight out of Korea, Momondo showed me a flight on Jejuair, a tiny airline that surprisingly cheaply flies direct to Bangkok from Busan every night.
One thing I will say is that I have found that on their app (which is just as easy to use!), I am not always able to find the same flight prices as I can on the website using my computer. They seem to be higher in general on the app than they are on the website, I’m not sure why.
AirAsia ASEAN Pass
This is something I’m still looking into right now, but it looks incredibly promising for travel within Southeast Asia specifically. You can buy 10 flights for a period of 30 days for only about $167 USD total - yes, for all 10 flights, plus some airport taxes. These flights go between the major cities on Air Asia’s routes, including Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Laos. It’s a really exciting idea and seems like a really affordable way to make the most of your travel time without spending a lot of money.
Are there any websites you use to book cheap flights? What’s your favourite website for booking travel in general?
