How to Find Cheap Winter Airfare

If weather is a major determining factor for you when you’re planning a vacation, then you might have one of a few potential reactions to planning a trip in the winter. You might think that winter is the time to hole up indoors and keep warm, in which case you can’t possibly imagine having fun during a holiday. You might be a snow junkie and look forward to winter all year long. You might think that midway through your snow-laden winter you’re going to need a warm getaway to perk up your spirits. Or you might dread the holiday travel scene and the hassles that come with it.

Above all, however, if you’re contemplating a trip at any point during the winter months, paramount among your concerns should be how to save money on airfare. Some places you’ll want to visit in the winter will offer deals that are the lowest you’ll see all year – while others will have routinely higher fares than you think they should. And if you’re planning a trip home for the holidays, you’ll need all the money-saving help you can get.

Here are some tips to help you find cheap winter airfare for your next trip.

Be Flexible

This tip is so often repeated that it hardly warrants mentioning again – but if you’ve never heard it, then this one’s for you.

There are days each week and times each day when airfare prices go up and down – and while there are some guidelines to when the lower prices typically appear (see the point below), it’s not a hard and fast rule. That means the worst thing you can do when you’re starting to look for cheap airfare (in the winter or any time) is to limit yourself too strictly to a particular day or – even worse – a short window of time on a particular day.

You can, if you want to, enter multiple dates and times into any booking site to see if you hit upon one of the times when prices on flights are lower, but there’s an easier way. Use one of the booking sites that has the ability to search multiple dates and times for you. Near where you enter your travel information, look for a box with the words “my dates are flexible” or something like that – and check that box. You’ll usually get fare information for a few days on either side of the date you put in.

Find Out When Fares are Cheaper

As mentioned in the point above, there are days each week and times each day that tend to offer cheaper airfare. Do you have to be some kind of clairvoyant to know when they are? While that might help, and while there aren’t any unbreakable rules about when those days and times are, there are some trends that you can start with when you’re searching.

The cheapest day to fly is typically Wednesday, followed by Tuesday and Saturday. The cheapest times to fly on any given day tend to be the earliest flights each morning (the ones no one wants) and late-night departures, including red eye flights.

Don’t Forget Budget Airlines

The big airlines might have the most available flights and you might see their ads more often, but sometimes it’s worth sacrificing a bit of time to save a lot of money. And although there aren’t as many budget airlines in the U.S. as there are in some other parts of the world, it’s always worth checking whether there’s a discount carrier flying into your target destination.

Many of the budget airlines don’t give their best fares (or any of their fares) to the big booking websites, so you’ll need to find out which airlines fly into your destination and then look up those airlines on their own websites. If you would have a layover midway from your departure point anyway, it could save you quite a bit to switch to a smaller, local, and discount carrier rather than fly the whole way on a legacy carrier.

>> Here are some lists of budget airlines in various parts of the world to help you save

Look at Alternative Airports

In addition to checking out smaller regional airlines for your trip, another way to potentially save money on winter airfare (not to mention airfare any time of year) is to look at airport alternatives. Some cities are large enough to have multiple airports serving the area, and although one usually tends to be dominant there are sometimes better deals into the smaller airports.

If you’re not sure whether there are multiple airports in a specific location, you can often start typing just a city name – rather than an airport code – into a booking site and it will either offer several options (and then you can try different searches) or it will offer a city code that covers multiple airports at once (LON for all of London’s airports, for instance).

>> Here are some alternate airports for major US hubs

photo by inkiboo