Find Cheapest Flights with Skiplagged, Skyscanner

What's up guys! In this video I'm going to talk about how you can find the cheapest flights to anywhere you need to go. Now if you're a returning subscriber, this content is a little bit different from what I usually make with the travel vlogs and travel cinematography, but I figured I should post this on this channel anyways because if you're interested in travel in any form whatsoever, this will probably be valuable to you. Now for those of you who are new to this channel, my name is Nadir and I've had the incredible privilege of traveling to hundreds and hundreds of cities and something like 60 or 70 countries and most of that has been in the last three to four years. A big part of the reason why I've been able to travel so much recently is because I am a massive nerd. Not just when it comes to history, as you might know if you watch my other videos, but also when it comes to learning about travel hacking and finding the cheapest way to get somewhere. I've spent years doing research on how to find the cheapest flights, done a lot of trial and error and learned from my mistakes and I'm proud to say that I've got the methodology for finding the cheapest flights down to an exact science. And the good news for you is that you don't have to spend years figuring this out because I'm gonna break it down for you in the next five to ten minutes and tell you exactly what you need to do. So without further ado, let's kick into it. So at first I'm gonna go over how to find the cheapest flights if you have specific dates in mind and if you don't really have a flexible travel schedule, which is the case for a lot of people like me, like I only get to travel when I have breaks from grad school because I teach and be here for the academic school year. So the first website that I'm gonna go to for this is Google Flights, which is one of my favorite websites for finding the cheapest flights. Now let's say you have some specific dates in mind. I'm gonna set that to March 13th to 22nd because that's when my spring break is for my upcoming semester of grad school. And you have to pick your home airport, which for me is Los Angeles. And then you just hit the search button and this is the best part. You get this really nice little map on Google Maps and it shows you all the prices for those dates that you selected. And let's zoom out a little bit, let's say you want to go abroad. This is not cheap at all, but I bet if you go to Europe, yeah, that's pretty cheap. $3.61. And green means it's cheaper than usual. That's something to keep in mind. Now, even if you have a specific place where you want to go, this is still good to pull this up. So for example, I really want to go to Nicaragua if I can make that happen around March. But even then, I usually pull out a map and see all the prices to the places around Nicaragua. So in this case, I can see, just give it a second to pop up. Yeah, in this case, you can see that the flight to Nicaragua or Managua is $543. But there's a flight to San Jose nearby, and there's a flight to San Salvador for $348. That's almost $200 cheaper. Last time I was in El Salvador, the hostel I was at was like $6 a night. So that's, I think like a month of accommodation in El Salvador. So you could technically fly to San Salvador, take a shuttle from there to Nicaragua, which probably take like six to 10 hours, and then come back with another shuttle, see both countries, and it would still not spend 200 bucks doing that. Now, let's say you found a place where you want to go. In this case, let's say I'm just going to stick with Managua. Let's say I really want to fly direct to Managua. The next step is after you do this, after you pick this place, is to go over to another website, and it's called Skyscanner. Cool thing is that if I go to Skyscanner, and I'll put in the exact dates. So Los Angeles to Managua, right? So here's the really cool part. This whole trip, the cheapest that Google Flights could find was $545. You go over to Skyscanner, you see $475. And that is almost always the case when I look at Skyscanner after looking up some flights on Google Flights. Now, let's try this for something else. Let's try a more popular route from New York to Paris. And I'm gonna pick the same dates again. March 22nd. Here you go. And I'm gonna do the same thing on Skyscanner. Once again, you'll see the cheapest flights that Google Flights has shown me is $296. If I go over to Skyscanner, it shows me something that's $284. Now, you gotta be careful about connections like this one. So in this case, you see it's like a 32-hour flight, which means there's like a long layover in Helsinki that you want to avoid. But it's usually not the case. A more extreme example would be this trip to Indonesia that I'm eyeing for next summer. So Google Flights, the cheapest it shows me for a round trip to Jakarta next summer is $704. If I go over to Skyscanner to see the same thing, same dates, exact same dates, May 14th to Saturday, August 22nd, $583. That's $120. Indonesia is another one of those countries where I've stayed in hostels that are $5 a night. So this is, yeah, this is almost a month's accommodation right there. It's always worth checking if the prices for your flights change if you go a day before or a day after because in most cases you can afford to lose a day or two and sometimes it makes a big difference. Okay, so let's go back to that example of New York to Paris. So I had the dates from Friday to Sunday and flights are often more expensive on the weekends. Okay, so if I switch the date from Friday to Thursday, the cheapest on Google Flights is $290. On Skyscanner, it's $281, which is ridiculously cheap for a transatlantic round trip. So let's say you have your decision narrowed down to exactly what day you want to fly. Before you book it, I would recommend going back to Google Flights to check something real quick and it has this really cool feature. Let's say, go back to my Nicaragua round trip in March. If I select the flights, so I'll go for this one, you can scroll down and you can actually see how this price that you see right now compares to how much it usually costs. So over here, you'll see that $543 for a round trip in March is typical. Now, if this is somewhere in the green area and you know you're flying there for sure, my recommendation is to just go ahead and book that flight if you know you're flying for sure. Now, if this bar slider is over in the red area or maybe in the yellow, it's probably a good idea to wait a week and see if it drops. And Google Flights also makes this really easy for you to track that. All you have to do is go over here to the top and click on this button that says track prices. What is this going to do? I'll show you. You will get an email from time to time every time the flight changes. So for example, I have already been tracking this particular flight and I got an email a couple of days ago saying that, oh look, the price dropped from $597 to $557. But I still haven't bought this flight because you notice that the slider is kind of in the middle. If it dropped to like $300, I'd probably have bought it by now. Now, if you don't have a specific day when you have to fly out or fly back in, that opens up a whole new world of opportunities for you and I'm going to show you exactly how to make the most out of that. So we'll start with Google Flights again and I'll just do the same thing that I did before. What I'm going to do this time is that instead of picking specific dates, I'm going to say flexible dates. And Google Flights gives you these amazing options. Like it'll show you a one-week trip in the next six months, two-week, weekend. Although for the weekend, I'll be a little bit careful. Sometimes it shows me trips that are from like Saturday night to Monday evening and calls it a weekend trip. If you have a flexible schedule, Skyscanner actually also has a maps feature that will be good for you. The reason I didn't mention this earlier because to the best of my knowledge, it doesn't let you pick specific dates. It just lets you pick a month, which is less options than Google Flights. But remember, Skyscanner almost always shows you cheaper prices than Google Flights does. So even if you're using any other website like Google Flights to find your prices, it's always worth double checking on Skyscanner after you pick that specific flight to make sure there's not a better deal out there. So far, we've covered the very basic steps of finding the cheapest flights. Now, there are a few more things that are a little more complicated that can save you even more money. And good news for you is I'm going to go over that as well. So let's go over to my third favorite website, which is SkipLag. Before I go over what SkipLag is, I have to explain to you how airline flights or how flight prices often work. Sometimes you'll notice you can go from Los Angeles to Chicago for like $120 and that involves a layover in Denver. But with the same airlines, you'll find that a direct flight from Los Angeles to Denver will cost you like $150. Now, why does this happen? Why is it cheaper to go to Denver and then go somewhere else than going exactly to Denver? The exact algorithm is beyond the scope of this video, but the bottom line is that because companies have figured out that that is a more profitable way to do things. And what you need to know is that you can make the most of this opportunity using services like SkipLag. So the easiest way for me to explain to you what SkipLag does is just to go over the website and show you. So let's say I am going somewhere from Los Angeles. Just have to put that in here. Search deeds. So look at that. It shows me the cheapest direct flight from LA to New York on this day, May 30th, is $131. But, but, if I booked a flight through United that was going to Orlando and then I just got off during my layover in New York, I could get that for $102. And I think that's a better deal than $131. There are some concerns about using SkipLag. I'll actually link an article in the description of this video that talks about things you need to be careful about when doing this. So I want you to read that and make your best informed decision. But there are two things that I'm going to tell you in this video that you particularly need to be careful about. So the first thing you need to be careful about is no checked luggage. Like the example I mentioned, if you book a flight from LA to Orlando and if you check luggage and you get off in New York, you're not going to be able to take your luggage in New York. Your luggage is going to The second one is, if you have an account with the airlines that you're booking with, it's best to not book your flight through that account. Now obviously airline companies are not very happy if you're hacking their system. To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing they can actually do about it. But if they find out, if they figure out that you're doing this constantly and if you have an account with them, the worst I've heard is that they can revoke your miles. They can take away airline miles and other perks that you have. And the least I feel like they could do is stop giving you new perks for traveling with them if you're hacking their system constantly and they figure it out. Again, read the article that I post in my description. Make your own decision. Do what you think is best. Talking about miles, it makes for a very nice transition into the next segment, which I'm going to touch briefly on, which is airline miles and credit card points. If you know how to make the most out of credit card points, you can travel for pretty much free. Now this applies in America. I know this applies in a couple of other countries like Canada, Australia, but this doesn't apply to every country. So check to make sure it actually is valid to you before you watch this whole segment. The thing with airline miles is that you can literally travel for free. So I did a trip last summer from Los Angeles to Rome using American Airline Miles that I got as a and that trip cost me $5.60. 5.60. Direct flight, Los Angeles to Rome. I did another flight last or 2018 December from LA to Marseille in southern France. That one cost me something like $12 or something like $13 I want to say. Flight from LA to London to Marseille, $12 for all of that. I booked another flight this summer in summer 2019 from LA to Stockholm with a short layover in Helsinki. This time it cost me relatively a lot like $85, but the reason for that was because I booked my flights 10 days before my actual trip and I didn't know American Airlines has a $75 fee that it charges you if you book your flight too soon to the day of travel. These three trips combined I spent like $100. If you take out that $75 late fee that I was charged, I would have spent like $30. That's $30 for three trips from the west coast of America to Europe. I am not kidding when I say I've spent more for an Uber from the LA airport to my place on multiple occasions. So how is this possible? How exactly airline miles and credit card points work is beyond the scope of this video. There are great websites out there like The Points Guy and NerdWallet where they can explain to you in great detail what to do and what not to do. So what I'm going to tell you, take your time doing the research before you start trying these things and if you don't understand what you're doing, don't do it. Don't get yourself in credit card debt, miss payments, screw up your credit score and then blame me because I told you to do this. Make sure you know what you're doing before you do it, but if you can figure this thing out like I have and a lot of other people have, you can essentially travel for free and this is what a lot of long-term travelers like me do. The best part is if you can figure this out, you can come out of it with a better credit score than you had before. Like I know I have a better credit score than 90% of people my age in the US. So I think I've gone over pretty much everything I wanted to on this video and that should give you a great place to start to find the cheapest flights to wherever you want to go. What I'm saying right now is very relevant right now. It's going to be very relevant in all of 2020, maybe 2021. It has been relevant for the last couple of years, but it's probably not going to be the case in five years or ten years. So what you should do after you watch this video is see the description and see any comments that I've pinned because it is possible that the information that I provided you needs to be updated and I'll definitely mention that in the comments and the description as things need to be updated. If you like this video, hit that like button and do let me know. I know that I say this for every video, but for this one I really need you to let me know because this is not the content that I usually produce on this channel, but if it is really helpful, I can produce more helpful stuff like this because this is already information that I know and it really doesn't take a lot of effort to create these videos. If you have any questions about any of the things I said, please post them in the comments and I will try to get back to you as soon as I can. And finally, if you thought this was helpful, feel free to subscribe to my channel to get more helpful tips or watch more of my travel videos. Even when I make normal videos or travel vlogs about going to different places, I do talk a bit about how to get the best deals where you're going, what to do, what not to do, and how to get the best bang for your buck essentially. That's it for this one. Thank you for watching. Now go out there and book those cheap flights and thank me later. Take care.