Google Flights
When it comes to searching for flights, one of the best tools out there is Google Flights – very user friendly with quite a few nice features. You can search for round trip, one way and multi-city flights; you can choose a specific airline or alliance, outbound/inbound time, min/max price, non-stop or 1+ stops, etc. And one of the best features is that you can play with the dates very easily; once you choose your departure date it automatically shows prices for the next 60 days in the calendar format. This is our #1 option when searching for the cheapest fares.
Kayak
If you don’t have a specific destination in mind and just want to fly somewhere/anywhere – Kayak has a neat feature called “Explore.” It lets you choose your departure city, max price, flight time and shows your flight prices to various places around the globe. This is a nice tool to get an idea where you can fly with a specific budget in mind.
Southwest Airlines
For the USA based travelers, Southwest Airlines has something similar to Kayak’s “explore” feature – you can see prices to various destinations based on your preferred travel dates. Since none of the search engines (Google Flights, Kayak, Orbitz, Expedia or others) show Southwest Airlines flights, this tool is useful when looking for flights within the USA (and some international destinations that Southwest services).
The Flight Deal
TheFlightDeal is another source that we highly recommend. The algorithm they use finds some insane fares – thanks to them we were able to score some really cheap flights from Chicago – $220 flight to Abu Dhabi, $450 flight (in business class) to Beijing, $440 flight (in business class) to London and some others. We’d suggest following them on Twitter, signing-up for their newsletter or just checking their site periodically.
Great Circle Mapper
In cases when you need to figure out flight distances between cities (mileage run comes to mind) – the Great Circle Mapper is an excellent tool to use.
Flight Diary
This one is more for fun – some people like to keep track of all their flights, airlines flown, distance traveled, etc. There are a few tools that serve this purpose but our favorite is the Flight Diary. Among basic things like miles flown and mapping flights on Google Maps, they track your top airports, top airlines, time spent in the air, domestic vs. international flights, as well as some other cool stuff.
