Airline Tickets

Airline Tickets are one of my most frequented requests for help. After all, buying ticket one day sooner or later can sometimes cause you to pay up to 100% more for a ticket. Personally, I do not like using Orbitz or Expedia. A lot of people have raved about Hipmunk.com (created by the founders of Reddit). Personally, yes the interface is cool and I like the bar charts but I care about sites that can help save me the most money. Here are my best tips:



1) Obviously traveling on Monday, Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays, you're going to pay a premium for. Consultants travel on Mondays out to the client and back home on Thursdays. Fridays and Sundays you have the weekend travelers to compete with. Although not a fast and hard rule as I've gotten plenty of cheap plane tickets even on a Monday morning flight, flying out Tuesdays and Saturdays tend to save you money.
2) Southwest Airlines doesn't like to participate in Orbitz/Expedia travel searches as well as other search engines. Always double check to make sure Southwest isn't flying out at a cheaper costs. Factor in that Southwest tends to fly to smaller airports (Burbank vs LAX; Midway vs O'hare; Hobby vs IAH).
3) Flights tend to be cheaper on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Again, not a hard and fast rule, but from my experience, I've gotten my cheapest tickets on a Tuesday and Wednesday. As an example, Vegas on 9/29 for $200 Roundtrip United. Burlington, VT for $286 Roundtrip Labor Day Weekend. Both tickets were bought on Tuesdays and they were significantly more expensive earlier in the week.
4) Buy far our in advance. My co-worker purchased a ticket to SFO 3 days prior for $280 last year. SFO on ANY day for $280 is a great price especially flying out of Houston. He got lucky and I can guarantee that it will almost not happen again for a while. As soon as you know when you're traveling, start looking at tickets. Look every day and keep track of price movements.
5) If you have the luxury of time, look at other airports. When I say other airports, I mean living in Houston, I have driven to Dallas and Austin because my flight was almost $200 (x2 sometimes) cheaper. The reason why airlines can vary so much in pricing is because of competitiveness. For example, to fly to SFO from Austin, United competes with AA and Virgin both who have direct flights to SFO. However, in Houston, there are no other airlines that fly to SFO directly and people are willing to pay a premium to not have to stop.
6) My Best tool for you to use I use Google Flights when searching for all of my flights. Click here and start searching for flights. Play with the dates and move them back and forth and watch as the price drops. There is no quicker/more simplistic way to find flights for your travels. I can literally find the pricing differences of 10 different weekends departing from IAH, HOU, AUS, and DFW in the same time it would take you to find two different dates on Expedia.
Here's an example flight I found for you. Yeah there's a stop but its also $240 Roundtrip.