Flexibility is obviously an important thing to bear in mind. The more rigid your travel dates the trickier it is to find the best and cheapest flights. Try not to tie yourself down to exact departure dates if you want the best prices. Sometimes just altering your search by a few days can bag a real bargain. As an example, this summer we were looking to travel to Costa Rica in August. Skyscanner showed the cheapest departure date as the 7th August, however to get around 3 weeks away the return flights were bringing the total to £850 per person. By juggling our departure dates and trying a few days earlier we found the perfect flights with the same Airline for only £600 per person.
It may sound silly but knowing where you want to go is essential when researching any trip. We always have an impromptu family 'meeting' and outline what everyone wants from our family holidays. This year the boys wanted to avoid another trip to Asia. So after a little discussion we set our sights on the Americas. We were flexible in out ultimate destination, knowing that flight availability and cost would ultimately determine our final choice. Though we did have a shortlist of several possibilities.
Unfortunately in life we can't always have what we want. To avoid any false hopes and wasted planning time it is imperative to set your budget early. Have a pretty firm idea of these three areas - flights, accommodation and spending money. How you allocate funds to each of these areas really depends upon your destination. In Europe where low cost airlines make travel so cheap it is easy to keep flight costs to between 10-25% of the total holiday cost. Longer haul these costs grow to between 30-50% depending on destination. By finding the cheapest flights possible though you do allow yourself more freedom when booking accommodation and planning activities.
We aim to average £50-60 per night on our travels if research shows it's possible. For example in Thailand this was easy to do without any compromise, sometimes we went for the £20 a night family room with basic facilities then followed it up with a splurge in a £100 a night beachfront place. What was important was I knew how much I had to spend and planned accordingly. This year in Costa Rica I've had to up the budget as accommodation is more expensive though we've gone a little higher than previous years by aiming to average £70 per night we've pretty much stuck to budget.
As mentioned previously, FLEXIBILITY is the key to getting what you want. We all have constraints on our travels, money, holiday entitlement, school term dates, seasonal variations in weather, however being as open to the full range of options will help you get what you want at the price you can afford.
Bearing this in mind we can caution against being too flexible. On our Sri Lanka trip we compromised on our flights out, accepting a 17 hour layover in Oman as worthy of return flights for £440 each. Was it worth it? For us no. We learned from our experience and have never repeated such a lengthy lay over. Our outward journey ended up as 37 hours door to door and took us 2-3 days to recover.
Skyscanner has been our saviour every long haul journey we have made. Other flight search engines such as Google flights, Momondo and Expedia are useful but so far we have never beaten Skyscanner for prices on flights we've identified an interest in.
As explained earlier be flexible in the dates you select to fly, and even when you identify the cheapest departure be aware that the total flight cost might be cheaper by selecting a more expensive departure. Mix and match, try lots of different combinations. Also don't tie yourself to one departure airport. Scottish airports are cheaper from mid August as their schools return, different areas have different school holidays so use this to grab a bargain. Airport parking can be cheap and by departing elsewhere you can save serious £££'s.