Everybody wants to travel to dream destinations, but finding the cheapest way to do so is always the challenge. Cheap flights are one of the most searched topics on the internet, and everybody has their tips and tricks for getting the best deals.

By now, many of these have been tested, but just a handful consistently give you the best results for cheap international flights. These are the best five tips to find a cheap flight.

1. Fly With Points for Free Flights and Upgrades

There’s a good chance that you have a credit card in your wallet right now, but are you using it to its fullest potential? Many credit card companies offer reward points when using their cards. Travel expenditures are one of the top categories that people use reward points for. You could already be sitting on a free ticket to your favorite destination or a flight upgrade from economy to first class.

Three Ways to Get Reward Points:

  • Sign up for credit card.
  • Use the credit card.
  • Qualified purchases.

Each reward point has a set dollar value that can be redeemed for perks. Travel usually gives the highest dollar value per point exchanged.

Major credit card companies provide exclusive shopping platforms for even greater discounts. The platforms will have a category for travel where you can book flights directly through their site at considerable discounts.

2. Use the Best Flight Search Engine

Finding flights online is easy, but finding cheap international flights takes a bit of skill and luck. Thankfully, many sites are making it easier to browse for flights, especially if you know how to utilize them correctly.

Some of The Best Flight Search Sites Are:

  • Skyscanner: flight search engines to allow you to browse from your origin to any destination. Select where you’re flying from and set the destination for “any,” and you’ll get an entire list of cheapest flights on your specified date of travel.
  • Google Flights: see a variety of flight destination from almost every airline. They will always display the lowest price based on the airline, but also shows the entire range of flights from all applicable airlines.
  • Airfare Watchdog: flight search engine and blog that always reports about amazing deals for cheap or last minute flights. Keep an eye out on their site for breaking announcements, and you may even hear about pricing mistakes for extremely cheap airline tickets.

The days are over for people visiting an airline website directly to book a flight unless you’re a part of a frequent flyer program or have specific preferences. If you’re looking for the cheapest way to get from your origin to your destination, then these flight aggregate sites are the best option.

3. Fly on The Best Day

There’s a couple of things to consider when trying to determine the best day for traveling to your destination.

  • Peak travel: has a lot of passenger traffic at an airport (such as summertime and holidays).
  • Flexible travel: the lowest prices are on Tuesday and Wednesday; the highest prices – on weekends.

Flight prices are sensitive to them both. As you can expect, any travel plans during a peak period will result in higher ticket prices.

Off-Season Dropping

Airlines drop their prices during the off-season to encourage more people to fly during these times than others. If it doesn’t matter to you when you travel, it can be a significant advantage to your savings.

Flight search engines now allow you to select an option for flexible dates and the results will display a range of dates of travel to find the cheapest option. Sometimes, even last minute flights are less expensive than booking months in advance. The more flexible you are, the better because even a one-day difference can save you hundreds of dollars on your flight.

4. Book Connecting Flights Separately

Booking your connecting flights is usually overlooked because it takes more time and planning. Most people want the booking process to be as simple as possible:

  • Choose origin and destination.
  • Choose dates.
  • Select a flight and book.

Even for flights not going directly to the destination, it will automatically display your layover destination within the final itinerary.

Flight Route Layover

If you don’t mind spending the extra time booking separate legs of your trip yourself, you could save money along the way in the final cost of the flights. You can check to see if a flight route will have a layover and return to the searches to browse each of the trips individually.

There’s a good chance that booking several one-way flights instead of one roundtrip ticket will save you money. One thing to keep in mind when doing this is to ensure that the flight times line up to have time to get to your connecting flight.

5. Stopover Flights

Stopover flight is a flight that has a brief layover before continuing to the final destination. Stopover flights have always existed, but it’s a relatively new strategy for finding a cheap flight to your destination. It’s common to find that booking a flight that has a layover at your destination is cheaper than booking a direct flight to your destination.

When the flight arrives for the layover, consider it your final destination and enjoy the savings. Although it’s legal, some airlines look down on passengers doing this. The biggest caution with stopover flights is that if you check your bags, they may continue to the final destination so only having a carry-on bag is advised for this strategy.

Tip: Try not to brag about your savings too much to your seat partner.

Skip the Middle Man

There’s an entire industry of people who get paid to book cheap international flights for clients. In most cases, they are applying many of the strategies detailed in this article. You can skip the middle man and get right to the savings.

Try to use one or more of these techniques, and you’ll be booking the cheapest flights in no time!