Find CHEAP Flights on Google Flights [UPDATED TECHNIQUES]

today I'll show you my top strategy for finding the cheapest flights with Google flights plus two other tools that you can combine with Google flights to knock the price down even cheaper this is a strategy my wife and I have used to score some crazy cheap flights all around the world and it's pretty simple there are tons of flight search engines out there but Google flights is the most powerful for a couple different reasons which I'll show you there is one weakness however which is where the other tools come into play so here we are

in Google flights and I want to start by giving you a few different scenarios on how you could search for your flights the first is if you know exactly which days you need to fly on like a school vacation or something but you haven't decided on a destination and you want to look for all your cheap options since you know your dates but not your destination we're going to put in your home airport so we'll say our home is New York and if there are multiple airports in your city a little trick is instead of

typing a specific airport like JFK okay you can just type in New York and it will automatically search all the airports so here we're going to leave the destination empty and just choose the days we want to fly on let's say we want to travel from May 1 to May 8 by the way if you're traveling with other people one bonus tip is to search for flights one person at a time if you search for multiple people Airlines like to Bunch everyone into the same price bucket so if there aren't enough seats in the cheapest

price bucket for everyone in your group then every one in your group automatically gets bumped up to the next price bucket okay so click done click search and so what this is going to do is it's going to bring up all the destinations for those dates that start in New York and so you can quickly see which ones are the cheapest so then you can zoom out and you can go all over the world basically to see what the prices are at different places on those dates and if you want to go to smaller airports

you can keep zooming in and you can get more options so I'm zooming in and out here and then then over here on the side you can add a bunch of filters to find exactly what you're looking for even faster you can see how many stops you want you can set your times that you want to travel the flight duration so if you want a super short flight you can set it low if you don't care how long it takes you can set any duration you can set the number of stops if you're on a

budget you can also set your price so let's just say you're leaving from New York and you want to escape on a one-way flight and you only have $500 so you could set it for $500 and these are all the options that you have and if you're really flexible you can add multiple departure cities in this map view and search them all at the same time without slowing it down just hit the plus button here and add them in so for our New York example let's put New York here which includes three airports and Washington

DC which also includes three airports and Philadelphia and let's say Boston so many of these would be an easy train R away so now you're seeing the cheapest flights on a specific day that leave from several nearby airports and go all over the world this is way faster than opening up a million different tabs and other search engines and running these searches individually to try to piece together a cheap combination but let's say you want to do a tour of different European cities for example in this case we can go back to the main Google

flights page and also add up to seven destinations at the same time so you could add in all the cities that you want to hit in Europe and it will instantly give you the cheapest departing and arrival airport combo and from there if you have a little wiggle room on your dates you can and hit the date grid to quickly see if adding or subtracting or shifting your dates would get you cheaper prices you can also click this button here to set price alerts for a flight on certain dates to a specific destination or a

flight to a destination on any dates but just make sure that you set the exact search and filters that you want before you turn on the price tracker because if you're not specific enough then you're going to get flooded with email updates from Google to be honest this isn't the most helpful feature but you can play around with it if you want want if you really want cheap flights the lazy way I recommend a tool like going which automatically emails you cheap flight deals from your airport up to 90% off if you're from the US

and like to travel it's kind of a no-brainer and I'll link to a free 14-day trial below another feature Google is piloting in the US is their price guarantee and these flights have a little colorful badge next to them and if a price drops on a flight Google will refund you the difference right now it only seems to be available on certain routes originating in the US and I haven't been able to find any of them myself but maybe that's just because I'm currently in Vietnam okay so that's scenario number one where you're flexible on

your destination but you're not flexible on your dates so now let's look at the reverse of that you know where you want to go but you're flexible on your dates and so let's say you're going to leave from New York the same as before and you want to go to Cali Colombia to visit Mitch and go out salsa dancing with him and taste his favorite Colombian fruit salad topped with cheese and ice cream so you're flexible with your dates and you're just going to click on the date here and it should load all the different

dates so now we can instantly see two months of prices at the same time and you can scroll out quickly to see prices way out into the future so just look for the green numbers to find the cheapest dates also make sure to choose the duration of your trip down here in the corner if you know it because as you can see by looking at the green the length of your trip will determine which days are the cheapest to fly on and trips that are seven days are more are often cheaper than shorter trips so

keep that in mind it's also helpful to run a search and then go in and set your filters and then recheck the calendar view for example if you didn't want to fly Spirit Airlines you'd uncheck the spirit filter so that the cheapest days in the calendar view aren't skewed by Spirit flights so now that we've quickly seen which days are the cheapest to fly on now we just choose those click done and here at the very top you'll see the cheapest flight that you just saw in the month view so that's a super easy way

to see what the cheapest days are to fly on but keep in mind that sometimes the cheapest option has a little bag symbol here which means the price doesn't include a carryon so if you need one you need to factor that into the price yourself also when you click here you can see that Google tells you how the current price compares to historical pricing data I've noticed that sometimes Google's normal range can actually be on the high side so sometimes it makes you feel like you're getting a steal when it's really somewhat of an average

price also keep in mind that you're now seeing the cheapest dates to fly but in a second I'll show you another tool that might be able to get you even cheaper prices on those cheap dates also note that Google flights and other OTAs don't include prices for Southwest Airlines so if one of these pops up in your search results you have to go directly to the Southwest website to check the price price but there's one more thing I want to show you and that's how to get the absolute cheapest flights out of all the strategies

by the way make sure to give this video a thumbs up if you're liking it so far so the last strategy is if you have the ultimate flexibility and you're flexible on your dates and you're flexible on your destination you just want the cheapest most awesome vacation possible and if that's what you want to do let's start over go back to the main page for Google flights and from here we're going to drop down and click on the map area once we're on the map we can play around with these different filters so the only

factor that we know is what airport or airports that we want to leave out of so let's switch it up this time and say we want to fly out of LA but I'll also put San Francisco just in case there happens to be a weird deal or something from there so we want to see the cheapest flights everywhere but we are flexible on our date so here we don't have to put a date and it'll automatically show one week trips in the next 6 months so it's basically just how it sounds it's going to show

you all the cheapest flights for one week chunks that happen in the next 6 months but you can also change it up a little bit if you want and you could say for example that you want to go on a twoe trip or a weekend trip or a onewe trip but only in August for example and so you can mess around with the dates like that and this gives you even more search power and you can also do all the same search filters as you used before like price and all those other different things also

remember that this isn't just for the us either and you can zoom out and move around and move all over the world and choose wherever you want to go another thing if you don't want to see the whole entire world you could say something like I want to leave from LA but I want to go anywhere in the country of Australia or anywhere in the entire oceanana region and so now it's going to search just Oceana for twoe trips in August and you can adjust that as needed and so it lets you filter through tons

of prices and find the cheapest destinations and cheapest dates all at the same time there's two more tricks I want to show you to get even cheaper prices but before we get into that I want to stress that Google flights is just one of many tools I'm putting together a new video of some other powerful cheap flight tools that most people haven't heard of so make sure to subscribe and hit the notification Bell if you want to get notified when that one drops I also created a free download with the tricks I use to essentially

cut my travel cost in half so feel free to grab that in the description if you like saving money okay so if you want to save even more money you can start by using Google flights to find the cheapest dates to fly and then plug those dates into tool like Mondo the reason you don't start with Mondo is it takes way longer to load prices for each date so comparing different destinations and determining the cheapest days to fly takes way longer the reason it takes longer to load is because Mondo searches a wider range of

online travel agencies which may offer special prices that are cheaper than what you'd pay booking directly with the airline that said you got to be careful in book with OTAs at your own risk because yes you can save money if everything goes according to plan but they can be a nightmare to work with if you have flight changes cancellations or refunds for some reason so I almost always book directly with the airline even if it costs a few bucks more One Last Resort trick to get even cheaper flights is to try using a VPN and

setting your destination to a different country or different currency on the airlines website when you're searching for the flights this doesn't always work but I've had cases where simply changing the location and currency has dropped the price significantly I personally use surf shark for my VPN because it's super cheap and allows you to connect to unlimited devices and if you want to try this strategy to save money on flights you can get 79% off surf shark in 2 months free using my link in the description this video isn't sponsored or anything and this strategy can

work with other vpns as well but surf shark is just the one that I personally use they also have a 30-day guarantee so if you try the strategy and it doesn't work you could technically just get a refund but in my opinion all the other features you get make it worth using longterm I really want to stress here that Google flights is just a tool for finding good deals kind of like a sword but if you really want to get the cheapest flights possible you need to learn the proper technique for using that sword like

knowing how far in advance to book using Airline laws to your advantage paying for your flight the right way and some other lesser known tricks I cover all these in this video so make sure to watch that one next let me know what you think about Google flights in the comments and I'll see you in the next one bye-bye