Buy cheap plane tickets for 10% of their initial price.

I proudly present Cheap Tickets Challenge that I have prepared for you.

Rules are very simple - minimum first 5 people who will complete this course each month can send to me a starting place and destination and more or less the date for travel and I will help them find cheapest possible flight.

Those people will be each time mentioned in the announcement I will send monthly. I will try to record best examples and show you how I search for tickets in CTC section of this course.

If you want to buy cheap plane tickets it’s crucial that both timings of flight booking and the actual flight are right.

When you choose the time for you flight you should avoid three periods when ticket’s are usually more expensive and those are:

• flights around beginning and end of working hours meaning 7-10 and 16-19 durinng weekdays.

• flights around weekends, so from Friday to Monday

• flights around state holidays and big events in your destination location

Another important factor that makes your airfare cheaper is how far ahead are you buying your ticket.

For well established and popular routes it’s better to book flight far in advance - ideally more than 3 months.

For connections not operated by airline itself, but by third party or connections that are not so popular we should book our flight between 1-3 months. Booking them earlier may sometimes mean that they are very expensive.

When we buy our plane ticket and we want to make it cheap we should also pay good attention to where we our buying it.

In airfare industry we have several players and each of them can offer us different price even for the same flight.

Let’s take a look at them:

• airlines - our main suppliers when we buy our ticket, we can buy tickets from them both online or from stationary point of sale at the airport or near big transport hubs like main train stations in city centers

• online travel agents - middlemen that buy tickets from airlines with discounts and sell them to us - here we also can buy tickets online and at stationary point of sales

• multisearch platforms - internet websites gathering and comparing offers from both airlines and online travel agents - most of the times here we would find best deal

By location we can also understand country in which we are buying our ticket. More developed countries are quite often having higher prices. We can avoid thus by faking our location.

Promotions are the most popular way of buying cheap plane tickets. Promotions are done to raise awareness of new connections or increase seat occupation on less popular connections

Promotions disappear quite fast as many people hunt for them but there are tricks to obtain first mover advantage when the appear.

Promotional vouchers are another type of promotion. We can get them as an incentive when we register our account for the first time with some of travel agents or as a compensation when our flight was cancelled. Some of airline industry employees get flight vouchers as part of salary or salary bonus.

If we are not an airline employee no worries, we can buy some of those vouchers on e-bay or many other coupon sides.

We can distinguish 3 main travel classes while travelling by plane:

• economy

• business

• first class

Those main classes can have different subclasses offering different features or restricting them.

If we want to fly with higher travel class we should always remember about supplu and demand. Sometimes economy class tickets on particular flight can have so high demand that their price is skyrocketting and at the same time business class can have almost none. Consequence of this is that economy class ticket price can get close or even higher than business class.

We have to deal with this case when we are buying tickets very close to actual departure date.

Frequent flyer programmes are loyalty programmes offered by airlines. When we travel a lot we can earn points or miles that afterwards are exchangeable for extra features, free flights or gadgets offered by airlines.

There are many different systems of rewarding and also figuring out which airline belongs to which frequent flyer programme isn’t the easiest thing to do.

What is worth mentioning is that you can gain points in frequent flyer programmes not only by purchasing flights. In many programmes you gain points by renting cars or staying in particular hotel chains. Sometimes you can even earn points in strange way as for instance buying The Economist subscription.

Human and system mistakes are most frequent cause of best deals. It happens because all prices everyday have to be manually inputted into one big system that is gathering information from airlines and makes them available to all travel agents.

Any mistake can result in ver y low ticket price and quite fortunately for us airlines are obliged to accept this kind of mistakes and accept tickets bought as a result of them.

In the web you can find many urban legends about how conducting certain activities can increase your price tickets.

In this lesson I test them and bust them so you wouldn’t have to think about them when you buy cheap plane tickets.

When we search a lot for good occasions to buy cheap tickets it is worth to make our arsenal of payment methods bigger in order to avoid any horrendous surcharges quite frequently imposed by online travel agents

Main payment methods that should be at our disposal are:

• debit cards

• travel friendly credit cards

• prepaid cards

• paypal account

We should to be able to get one of each as we don’t really know which payment method will be preffered by online travel agent when he launches good promotion.