How to find the CHEAPEST flights on Google Flights! (Money Saving Guaranteed)

Are you ready to save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars when booking your next flight? In today's video, I'm going to show you six Google flight hacks that will save you money as well as give you the confidence to know that you are getting the best price possible. Make sure you pay close attention to hack number five, because I'm going to show you a tool that will compare all flight databases with one simple click. Let's get into it. We're going to start by making our way to Google flights. Head to your browser and type in Google flights. You're going to click the top option. I really like Google flights because I feel like it has the most wide range database as well as I really enjoy some of their tools. Once you've reached Google flights, you're going to start where most people would naturally start, and that is the where from bar. Basically, where do you want to start your trip from? What airport do you want to fly out of? Most people just plug in the closest location or the airport closest to them. I'm going to do that for myself. For me, that's Minneapolis, so I'm going to plug in that airport. This is going to lead us into our first hack, which most people don't realize that you can add multiple airport locations in that where from bar. What I like to do is I like to add in other airports that are close by to me. You do that by clicking on the where from bar, and you're going to see a plus sign on the far right side. You're going to click that, and that's going to give you the ability to add more airports. For me, I'm going to also plug in Chicago because that's close by, and then maybe Madison, Wisconsin. What is so great about this is this will now give you a much broader range of flights to pick from because sometimes the cheapest flight option to whatever destination you're going to is not always coming from the airport that is closest to you. Now you will have flights pulling from all three airports, which can ultimately save you quite a bit of money. Hack number two. Hack number two is going to require you to change the entire way you think about booking flights. What I mean by this is typically people, when they book flights, they decide where they're going, how long they want to go for, and then they search for flights. Well, I'm going to challenge you to do the exact opposite. If you're really looking to get super cheap flights, you have to kind of almost reverse the order of this. To do this, you're going to start by searching for cheap flights, then deciding where you want to go and how long you want to go for. You're going to do this by using something called the Explore tab in Google Flights. Let's go to the computer here. I have my three airports plugged in. I have no destination. From there, what I'm going to do is I'm going to see this Explore icon. You're going to click on that, and a map is going to pop up. What this is going to do is this is going to give you locations and prices or destinations and prices from the three airports that you plugged in. You can see the three airports that I plugged in. There are these three pink dots, and you're going to see different price options. You're going to see $98 to Kansas City. You got $139 to Austin, Texas. What's great about this is you can look at the map and decide which flights are cheap, and that can help dictate where you want to go. We can even look out further on the map, and we can see Honolulu from Chicago for $460. That's a pretty decent deal. You can start to narrow down where you might want to go on your trip. What's also great about this Explore tab is once you've decided potentially where you want to go, you can start to get a little bit more specific on time of year and potentially length. You do that by going over to the left side of your browser. You're going to click on this calendar icon. It's going to give you options of potentially what month you want to travel in, how long you want to travel for, whether it's a weekend or a week or two weeks. Say I want to travel in October, and I want to travel for two weeks. Boom. That's going to change your search results. Now you can notice I can now see Austin for cheaper, $115 versus whatever it was before. I'm saving like $50, so that can be a really cool tool to use to help guide you to find cheap flights as well as help decide where you maybe want to go for your next trip. Hack number three, and that is going to be noticing the difference between round-trip fares and one-way fares. Now oftentimes Meg and I will book one-way tickets because it saves us a lot of money. A lot of times when you book a round-trip flight, they will strategically place you on the same airline, both outbound and inbound. Whereas you can end up saving a bit of money if you book two separate one-way tickets because you're not required to fly on the same airline both ways. Now I will say it does make for a little extra work in the booking, but it can maybe save you upwards of a couple hundred bucks. Let me show you on the computer here. So we're in the Explore tab now, and I have my same three airports plugged in. And let's just take a look at Austin for example, being that we've already kind of noted that destination. So you're going to notice Austin, round-trip is $139. Now I'm going to go up in the left-hand corner here, and I'm going to change this to one-way. And you notice the price obviously drops, but it's going to drop to $58. Now what's awesome about that is, as I was saying, is you might be able to find a cheaper flight with a different airline on the way back. So that is another thing I would potentially recommend exploring, is playing with the differences between a round-trip ticket and a one-way ticket. It might save you a few bucks. Hack number four, and this is probably one of my favorite features on Google Flights, and it's a feature called DateGrid, and let me show you how it works. So I'm going to plug in a little bit more of an interesting flight. So let's go Minneapolis to Paris, France. And let's go for a week. So we'll depart on, let's say, September 3rd, and come back on September 10th. One week trip to Paris. Click search, and you're going to be populated with a bunch of different flights. Now DateGrid is up in your right-hand corner, and you're going to click on it, and it's literally going to pull up a grid of various prices. And what's so awesome about DateGrid is it's going to show you how you can adjust your itinerary and timeline to save you money. So for example, I originally plugged in Sunday, September 3rd, to Sunday, September 10th. But if you can see on DateGrid, if I adjust that to Monday, September 4th, to Sunday, September 10th, I'm going to save almost $200. And even more so, if I go Monday, September 4th, to Tuesday, September 12th, I'll save like $400. So DateGrid on Google Flights can be a great way, if you have a little bit of flexibility in your trip itinerary, to adjust days on one end or the other to save you quite literally hundreds of dollars. So I'd recommend on your next trip, click on the DateGrid. See how you can adjust your days to save you a couple hundred bucks. Before we move on to hack number five, which is probably my favorite, let me know in the comments if you have any tips or tricks for Google Flights that have worked for you. I'm always looking to save money so we can travel more. Also, if you found this video valuable so far, please give it a thumbs up, as well as maybe share it with a friend to help them save a little bit of money on their next trip. All right, let's get into hack number five. And this is probably my favorite hack, as I was just saying, and it is something called Travel Arrow. And Travel Arrow is a Google Flights extension that you will need to download. But what Travel Arrow does, is it's going to compare tons of different flight databases, all with one easy click, to know that you are getting the best price possible. So let me show you how it works. You're going to go to your computer, you're going to open up your browser, you're going to go to Google Flights. In the top right-hand corner, you're going to see a bunch of, like a square dot icon. You're going to click on the square dots. You're going to scroll all the way down to the end, and you're going to see something called Chrome Web Store. You're going to click on that. You're going to go to the search bar, and you're going to click in Travel Arrow, and it's going to pop up at the top. It has this kind of like purple-pink background called Travel Arrow. You're going to click on that. Now for me, I already have it downloaded, so it says remove from Chrome, but basically you're going to click on this blue button that says download. Now once you download that, you're going to make your way back to Google Flights. So once you've made your way back to Google Flights, you're going to plug in your flight like you normally would. Let's just do the same flight that we've been talking about. So Minneapolis to Paris, France, we're going to leave on the 3rd of September, come back on the 10th, search for flights. And now this is the cool part. On the right side of your browser, you're going to see a white box come up, and this is going to compare prices from not only Google Flights, but all of these other third parties. So you can see we have Kayak, Skyscanner, Trip, and Expedia, and Other. I'm going to get rid of Other, and I'm just going to click Trip and Expedia, and click Compare. And you're going to instantly notice at the top of your browser, it's going to open up different pages for all of those third parties. And this is going to allow you to compare the price. So if we go back to Google Flights, we'll notice that the cheapest option here is about $1,338. Now let's make our way to Trips.com. You're going to notice that the cheapest rate is actually $990, so over $300 cheaper. Now let's make our way to Expedia. Expedia seems to be a little bit more expensive. Let's make our way to Kayak, similar on Kayak from what I can see. And then Skyscanner, see what we got on Skyscanner. Very similar on Skyscanner as well. But you notice, Trips.com, they found a cheaper rate. Must be a different combination of airlines and flights. So Travel Arrow can be a great way to build confidence in booking your flight to know that you're getting the best rate possible, because sometimes it can be really hard to know where to look. And this Google Flights extension will do it for you with just one click. So I highly recommend downloading Travel Arrow for your next trip. Hack number six. And this hack might not necessarily save you money, but I can promise you it'll make your flight a lot more comfortable, as well as make the booking process a lot easier. And this hack is another Google Flights extension called LegRooms. And before I talk about what it is, let's get it downloaded. So the same process as before, I'm going to go up to the right-hand corner, click on all the dots. I'm going to scroll down to Chrome Web Store. In the search bar, I'm going to type in LegRooms, click search, and it's going to be the top one. You're going to click on LegRooms. Where it says remove from Chrome, being that I already have it downloaded, you'll click download, and then you're going to make your way back to Google Flights. So what is LegRooms? LegRooms is an extension that is going to make it way easier to determine what amenities you're going to be offered on your flight. Things like how much legroom are you going to have? Does your flight offer Wi-Fi? Does it have USB ports for charging? Is there an entertainment system? All of those things are really, really important to the comfort of your flight, and sometimes it can be really hard when you're booking a flight to see if you have those amenities. I feel like we've all been there before where we book a flight and you're all excited to watch some movies on your flight, and then you sit down in your seat and you realize there's no TV screen. So LegRooms will help you solve that problem. And I think the best way to depict this is to show you what it looks like without this extension, and then to show you what it looks like with this extension. So let's start by showing you what it looks like without. So this is what Google Flights looks like without LegRooms, and you're going to notice it's going to give you your flight time, flight duration, your layovers or stops, emissions, and price. Okay, so now this is what it looks like with LegRooms. You're going to see the same stuff. You have your flight time, you have your duration of your flight, you have your layovers or stops, you have your emissions, and you have your price. But on the far right side, you're also going to see these added icons. And over here, you can see this flight has this symbol here, which means you're going to have USB charging. You're also going to have onboard Wi-Fi and a TV screen for movies or an entertainment system. It's going to tell you the plane that you're going to be on. And on the far right side, you're also going to see this LegRoom icon. It's going to give it to you in inches. And one thing to pay attention to is if any of these numbers in inches are highlighted. You're going to see right here this number in inches, this 29 inches is highlighted in red. And what that's going to tell you is you're going to have below average LegRoom, compared to if we scroll down, we see this flight here has 32 inches highlighted in green. That's going to tell you that you're going to have above average LegRoom. This Google Flights extension can be particularly nice if you're doing a long international flight where you're going to be spending hours on a plane. You want to make sure you book a flight with the amenities that you expect. Hopefully you get the opportunity to try out some of these hacks when booking your next flight. We all know traveling is a heck of a lot easier when you're not breaking the bank to do it. If you want to continue on your journey to making travel easier and a little bit more comfortable, I would highly encourage you watching the video we made about how to survive a long haul flight. It will completely change your mindset going into those long flights and hopefully make it a lot more comfortable. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel for more content like this. We will see you in the next video.