How to Plan a Trip – First Things First, Flights

Have some time off and you’re ready for a grand adventure? Fantastic! We’ve put together a series for the next few weeks on how to plan a trip. You may find our version a little unconventional, but it often ends up saving us a wad of money and makes the journey more exciting.

First things first, pick your dates.

Nope!

If you are operating on a tight travel budget (who isn’t these days?), the worst thing you can do is pick your specific travel dates before you do anything else. If you have a certain amount of time available to you to travel, hold on to those dates, but be flexible about when you’re actually traveling. There are certain days of the week/holidays/etc that are way more expensive to travel on, but if you can leave a day earlier or later you can often find prices drastically reduced.

Ok fine, then I’ll pick where I’m going.

Also, not the best idea.

Leaving yourself open to suggestions on where you go when you start to plan your trip is the best way to get the most out of your trip. Having a general idea is great, maybe a region or country, but don’t necessarily nail down a city yet.

Ok, this makes no sense. What do I do first?

First – you find your flight, even if you don’t know where you are going yet. Sounds weird but trust us, this is how we save the most money when traveling. And the money saved means more/better travel later on.

The first thing we do when planning a trip is head to Google Flights. There are ALL SORTS of apps and websites out there that claim to have the best prices on flights, but Google Flights is where we have the best luck. This allows us to search across many airlines at one time and purchase straight from those airlines, so if anything crazy happens, we’re covered. Plus, any perks we have from loyalty or credit cards will be honored when purchasing directly from the airline. This is not the case when you buy from a third party.

But you said we don’t know where we’re going, so how do you find a flight?

In Google Flights, on the left menu, click the Explore tab. It will open a map to the right and ask for travel information on the left. Where are you flying from, when do you want to be gone, round trip, one way, how many people, and what class would you like to travel in? Fill all these out as best you can but DON’T fill out the “Where to?” box. I also recommend using flexible dates instead of specific dates for the most flexibility. At this point, we don’t use any of the filters in the next line so we’re open to suggestions.

This should automatically start populating trip ideas with a range of dates under the search and pegging them on the map for you. If you have an overseas trip in mind, pan the map around until you find what you’re looking for. The closer you zoom in, the more options will pop up. If you’re not seeing anything you like, you can start adjusting your search from the left search column.

I’m going to use Europe and France as an example search. This is a friendly reminder that Europe is very interconnected. If you can’t find a flight directly into a location that interests you, try another close by. You may be able to drive or find a train ticket for far less than a flight directly into that location. Be flexible.

For example, say I want to go to Bordeaux in France. It’s $1442 for an economy ticket to fly into Bordeaux from Springfield in August. However, if I were to fly into Paris, it’s $1226. Once in Paris, I can catch the high-speed train from the airport to Bordeaux for $54, and probably be there before a connecting flight would. This saves me $162. That may not seem like a huge amount, but that’s enough to cover a rental car for a couple of days, a few nice meals, or your hotel room for a night. Plus, you get to see more of the country when you travel by train.

Using Google Flight’s Explore feature is the very first thing we do when planning a trip. From here, we continue to use Google Flights to find the specific flight we want and start planning the rest of our trip. Click on the city of your choice on the map, and the flight options will pop up in the search to the left. Once you choose your flights, you will be directed to the airline’s website to purchase.

Then it’s time to add the fun stuff to your trip!

We’ll be sharing more details on how we plan a trip over the month of April. Check back next week for what we do to find unique hotels and talk about some of the programs we use to get discounts and free nights.