5 travel booking hacks you probably believe, but shouldn’t
Booking an overseas holiday, or even just domestic airfares, can be expensive. It comes as no surprise then, that many of us love trying to save money on the cost of flights, hotels, rental cars and so on. However, new information has revealed that many popular travel booking ‘hacks’ no longer work, or were never true to begin with.
Want to know what you’re doing wrong, and which travel booking hacks actually work?
1. Tuesdays are the cheapest time to book flights
The myth used to be that airlines announce sales or deals on a Monday, making Tuesday the best day to purchase flights. However, this is no longer true.
Travel hacker search website KAYAK has discovered that the best time of the day to grab the cheapest flights in 2019 is the eye-watering hour of 3am. The website also discovered that Departing on a Monday and returning on a Thursday for international flights could save you up to 48 per cent on your travel costs.
2. Last minute flights are expensive
This isn’t exactly true. Although you can snag some cheap flights by taking advantage of early-bird sales, booking a flight at the last minute can sometimes be cheap, depending on how full the plane is and what demand there is for the flight. However, the flights are generally only cheap if you’re happy to fly to whatever the cheapest destination is at the time, so this trick doesn’t work if you have a particular city in mind.
However, a report by Contiki found that flights to Bangkok in Thailand are cheaper when booked closer to the travel date.
3. Booking directly with an airline will guarantee the cheapest flights
This is no longer true. Thanks to hordes of budget carriers, online travel agencies and flight search engines such as Skyscanner, it’s now easier than ever to compare the flights offered by all sorts of booking agencies in one place. For example, you could find cheap seats on a Qantas flight on a website like STA, that don’t appear on the Qantas website itself.
4. Purchasing return airfares are cheaper than booking separate flights
This is not true. In fact, you may find that booking with different airlines altogether for your inbound and outbound flights could be significantly cheaper. Better yet, plan in advance and try to book your flights during sales.
5. Clearing your browsers cookies will show you the lowest fares
This myth is a little hard to confirm or deny. The theory is that by tracking your searches via cookies, websites know what airfares you’re looking for and only show you the higher-priced flights. The idea is that if you clear the cookies, the history of your searches is no longer visible to the airline, and as such all flights at all prices will be revealed to you. It can’t hurt to try, though.
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