How to Get International Flights on a Budget

We have been preparing since January to go on a trip to Europe this summer with some of our friends. One of the biggest expenses was our plane tickets. After doing a TON of research, we were able to score some pretty cheap flights from the United States to Europe. Here I have compiled our best tips and tricks for scoring cheap flights around the world.

1. Use Google Flights:

I mentioned this before in our Top 5 Money Saving Travel Websites. Google Flights pulls all of the best prices from all the different airlines together in one place. They also give you calendars that show you the cheapest dates to fly. Once we put in where we wanted to go, Google Flights easily compared the airlines and we could see quickly which airlines were the best deals. 

2. Fly Out of Major Airports:

When looking for flights, we discovered that it was quite expensive to fly internationally from the Salt Lake airport (our home airport). So we looked at other major airports like JFK and LAX which were much cheaper to fly internationally from. We ultimately chose to fly from LAX because we knew we could get cheap flights from Salt Lake to LA. 

3. Look Into One-Way Flights:

For our trip, it ended up being much more cost effective to book one-way flights instead of round trip. This is especially true if you are planning on traveling around once you get to your destination. We knew we needed to get to Venice where we were going to be boarding our cruise around the Mediterranean. But when we looked into flying straight to Venice, it was too expensive for our budget. So we looked into other cities that we knew we wanted to see in Europe and Paris made the cut. We found a good deal on a flight from LAX to Paris where we spent a few days before flying to Venice. Our one-way ticket to Paris and our one-way ticket from Paris to Venice was a few hundred dollars less than flying straight to Venice. We found a good deal on a one-way flight to LAX from Venice. 

4. Have Flexible Travel Plans and Dates

This kind of goes with tip 3, but be willing to fly into different places than your final destination and be flexible within a few days for your trip. This alone saved us hundreds of dollars on our trip.