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Flights – Best time to buy?

We already mentioned in our trip planning page that there is no perfect time to buy tickets – the truth is the moment when prices are at their lowest is highly variable. This variation is dependant both on the time of year and the specific destination. There is no magic rule of thumb to try and guess when prices will be lowest, and contrary to popular belief, there is no best day on which to purchase your tickets either. Though some research has claimed that prices can be lower on Tuesdays, the evidence is not clear and we haven’t witnessed this in our experience.

Our advice is to do your own research and to start monitoring the prices of flights several weeks or months before you plan on purchasing them. Sounds complicated? Not at all! There are some great tools out there to help you do this. Our favourite to carry out the research is Google Flights.

Google Flights has so many cool features

• It will display the cheapest flight for every day over a two-month period after your selected departure date.

• Google Flights has a fantastic calendar view that shows you the cheapest flight over the next 12 months

• It lets you search for the cheapest fare between up to 7 origin and 7 destination airports
• It has a price tip tool to let you know if prices are expected to increase, and if prices are lower than usual.

• You can set up price alerts. If the price of your target flight goes up or down, you will be notified by email.
• You can also use a map-based search to see the cheapest places to fly from your airport during your selected dates/date range.

One small drawback with Google Flights is that it isn’t an online travel agency (OTA); it’s a flight search engine. That means you can’t actually book a flight on Google Flights. Instead, once you’ve selected a flight it will redirect you to the airline’s website where you can book directly. A second drawback is that it does not always show you THE lowest fare, as it doesn’t search some of the smaller budget airlines. But whether that is important is highly dependant on your destination and what you want to be included in your purchase price.

Kayak and Momomodo are great search tools too

Kayak was our first favourite tool prior to discovering Google Flights a few years ago. It shares a lot of the same metrics as Google Flights (but not all of them) and offers you advice on when to buy. Kayak uses its historical data to tell you whether you should buy now or wait and also shows whether or not prices are likely to go up or down in the next week based on trends. Kayak’s main drawback is the speed of its search engine, which is significantly slower than Google’s. Because of this, it’s best suited for when you’ve already narrowed down your dates and destinations (as a secondary search option).

We have also recently started using Momondo, another great metasearch engine and airfare aggregator that searches for the best airfare across the web. Unlike many online booking sites, Momondo also includes budget and lesser-known airlines as it works to find the lowest airfare. Impressively, this test shows that Momondo produced the lowest fares 95% of the time when compared to other popular aggregators.

Flights – some other tips

• Always check more than one aggregator website (Kayak, Google Flights, Momondo) to be sure to find the best deal for you.
• If you can be flexible with your dates, you’ll often find great prices. (Though will potentially come at the expense of potentially messing up the itinerary you had in mind).
• Midweek international flights are generally cheaper than those that depart on weekends.
• Start monitoring flight prices several weeks before you plan on buying them. We find that the best prices for international flights are found somewhere between 6 and 3 months prior to your departure date.
• Consider flying into alternative destination airports. Also, if potentially useful, consider alternative (i.e. cheaper) airports. For instance, it was significantly cheaper for us to fly into Venice (Italy) than into our true destination Ljubljana (Slovenia). This was still very true even when factoring in the transit time and cost between the two cities. In hindsight, however, we most certainly didn’t mind the slight Italian detour!
• Finally, before picking your seat, always check with the SeatGuru to avoid ill-advisable selections. It features aircraft seat maps, seat reviews, and a color-coded system to identify superior and substandard airline seats.

Car rental tips

We already mentioned on our trip planning page that there isn’t a secret recipe for getting the best car rental deal. We however have a few tips:

• Booking three to six months before you travel is usually ideal. Prices tend to be most competitive during this period. There isn’t much benefit to booking further ahead. If anything, prices tend to be higher a year ahead. 
• That being said, most car rental agencies offer free cancellation (with little or no money down). So even if prices drop after you made your initial reservation, you can cancel it and make a new one.
• Car rentals are typically more expensive at the airport than at other locations within the city. Though less practical upon arrival, the savings can potentially be substancial.
• The more seasonally popular the destination is, the more likely prices will fluctuate.
• In smaller places, cars can sell out, so waiting to see if prices go down can be risky.  
• Most rental cars are rented in 24-hr periods, so select your pickup and drop-off times carefully if you pick up the car at 10 a.m. on the first day and drop it off at noon on the last day, you’ll often be charged a whole day’s rental for just those two hours.
• Sometimes it can make a lot of sense to start and end your car rental in different cities, but that may add fees. Tough in some cases the extra cost of a one-way rental can still be worth it if it saves you a very long drive back.

Car rental booking

As we do for finding flights, we generally try out several different aggregator websites to find the best deals. In fact, we often seem to end up using a different aggregator every year (AutoEurope, Kemwel, VIP Cars, Rental Cars). Once you’ve found the best deal, we suggest comparing that with what you would find on the car rental agency’s own website (e.g. Hertz). We also strongly recommend reading reviews and review forums (e.g. TripAdvisor) before choosing a small foreign or seldom known car dealer (e.g. other the Hertz, Avis, Europcar, Sixt, and Enterprise’s of the world), which often offer cheap prices but can come with added dilemmas, stress, hidden fees, and poor customer service

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