Google Flights
After laying our my trip in Furkot, next I have to look for flights. Google Flights was my friend. Using this tool you can find possible flights from the major airlines for the location you wish to travel to. Some, like Southwest, are not shown as you have to go to their website direct to get pricing. Google flights does have a list of the airlines they can search in the Airlines menu. If your favorite airline is not shown in that menu, this tool may not be for you fully, but I would still use it for comparison.
Below is the main window (minus my tracked prices) where you can enter in where you are flying from and to. You can specify a specific airport or choose a city and it will search all nearby airports. In my example below, I choose the city of Baltimore and the specific airport of AKL for Auckland International Airport. This will search for any airport around Baltimore which includes Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, Dulles International Airport, and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
Once you select your cities/airports you will be sent to a calendar view if you do not specify dates, or to a list of flights for the dates you specify.
If you are a bit flexible on your leave and return dates, I recommend leaving the dates blank and you are sent to a calendar view like the below.
The advantage of this is you see the various prices for each day option. Prices vary greatly depending upon the date/day of the week you leave and this view shows you those prices. So if you are a bit flexible, you could save yourself some $ but adjusting your leave and return dates.
Once you have things selected and have found your flights. Be sure so select track flights. With this turned on, Google with track price changes on your selected flights and alert you as to an increase of decrease in price. Using this tool I saved $600 on my flights. As long as you track it, you can log back in and see a graph of pricing over time. In my case, about 3 months before I left was the sweat spot to purchase.
If you have sometime before you trip, you could even do some long range searching to see when the sweet spot might be for your flight. Flights generally show up 1 year in advance on this system. So for example if you wanted to take a flight in 2027, look for that same flight with the estimated dates you want in 2026. Start searching for those dates as soon as you can in 2025. This will end up giving you a charge of when the best price showed up for this flight so you have a good estimate on when the cheapest to book in 2026 for your 2027 flight.
Either way, good hunting.
