The Secret to Booking Cheap Flight Tickets

You may have heard that the best day to book a flight ticket is on a Tuesday. The standard explanation for this is that the airliners release their best prices early in the week – forcing competitors to fight it out to match their fares. Even the miniscule amount of truth in this suggestion is complicated by several other variables.

There are several tools at your disposal to help you navigate this murky process of trying to book cheap flight tickets – Google's Explore Flights and Kayak's Price Trend are the most popular. A few months ago, a firm called Hopper, who till now has been serving as an aggergator of travel blogs, started releasing interesting reports on how to cut down your travel costs. Researches and studies on travel trends are dime a dozen and most of them provide only a hazy image with no concrete takeaway. The report by Hopper differs in their frequency, transparency and clarity compared to other reports. Here's some useful conclusions that emerged from taking the tools from Hopper for a spin.

When to Book & When to Fly

For the vast majority of destinations, weekends are the worst time to book and for around 65% of the destinations, Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best day to book. The Hopper report revealed that the day of the flight and departure and arrival carries far more weightage than the day of the booking. For domestic flights, leaving on a Wednesday will save you as much as $40 and returning on Tuesday will save you a whopping $50. For international flights, departing and arriving on Wednesdays will render significant savings on your travel budget.

Where to Fly

It's not only about when to fly but where you fly to that makes a significant difference in your air fare. The Hopper report compares the most searched European destinations from New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago. London, Paris and Rome were at the top for all of the cities. But interestingly, the cheapest European destination from each of the cities varied considerably. From New York, it was cheapest to fly to Oslo and Copenhagen; for Chicago, it was Warsaw and Stuttgart;for Los Angeles it was Moscow and Stockholm and for Boston it was Istanbul and Lisbon.

The price difference was very significant – in certain cases, more than a intra-European flight ticket. Lets say you want to fly from Boston to Paris and a direct flight might work out to be around $1,089. Instead, you can fly from Boston to Lisbon for $677, and then find a cheap flight from Lisbon to Paris for as little as $150. On top of saving a cool bunch of dollars, you have gotten yourself a mini Lisbon vacation.

As with any data analysis, there are certain caveats to the Hopper reports – the average prices are calculated based on the cheapest 10 per cent of the results. This makes since most people ignore the impractical and useless results like a flight flying from New York to Washington with a stopover in Mumbai.