Finding cheap flights can be really challenging if you don’t know where to look. It’s especially challenging when you don’t fly out of an international airport or live in a big city. It could cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars to fly across the U.S. Luckily, I have found affordable ways to fly, and I’m going to show you how to do that!
How I Discovered the Coolest Travel Hack
Imagine flying to four metropolitan U.S. cities in two weeks for less than $500 plus starting and ending in your local, non-international airport. I did just that in October of 2021. At the time, I was a teacher and we were heading into fall break. It was 4 days before my break started, and I decided I wanted to go on a spontaneous trip.
I wanted to go to as many places as possible and visit cities like Boston or San Francisco, but the flights from my local airport were so expensive! I scoured the internet trying to find cheap flights from XNA to these destinations, but I found nothing. This is when I stumbled upon Skyscanner and ended up traveling around the country without breaking the bank!
Through Skyscanner, I found direct flights for less than $100 each to Tampa, Boston, Chicago, and Denver! First, I left Bentonville, Arkansas and flew to Tampa, Florida for a couple of days. Then I flew to Boston, Massachusetts from Tampa. After Boston, I flew to Chicago, Illinois. After a couple days in Chicago, I went to Denver and then I had another direct flight back to Bentonville. It was incredible, and I’m going to show you how I got to do that.
Bentonville > Tampa > Boston > Chicago > Denver > Bentonville
What is Skyscanner?
Skyscanner is a metasearch engine and not an online travel agency. When you search with Skyscanner, it helps you find the lowest possible rates. You don’t make any payments through Skyscanner. Instead, you will complete the transaction through whichever airline or travel agent you found through their search engine.
“Explore Everywhere” Feature on Skyscanner
This feature will help you save so much money when searching for cheap flights. When you go on the Skyscanner search engine, you have the options to set the departing and arriving locations, when you want to leave and how many travelers you’re looking for. There’s also an option to have only direct flights.
For this October 2021 trip, I set my “From” to my local airport and for the “To” I set it to “Explore Everywhere”. This feature will search for all the possible flights both domestically and internationally. For this particular situation, I set the exact departure date. I looked for a direct one way flight from XNA to an international airport. Tampa was the cheapest costing around $70.
Then, I opened a new tab and did a new search with the departing airport being in Tampa and searched for cheap direct flights from there. There were a few options below $100. I ended up picking Boston for a couple of reasons. I really wanted to visit Boston and from there I found a cheap flight to Chicago.
One of the important steps in making all of this work is to figure out which cities have direct flights to your local airport. Denver has a cheap direct flight to Bentonville so as I looked into Chicago, I saw a cheap flight to Denver so it worked out perfectly. I understand that this may not work every single time, but it is definitely doable and I wanted to share that in case anyone wants to attempt doing that.
Flexibility Saves You Money When Searching for Cheap Flights
If you want to save the most money when it comes to finding cheap flights, the best thing you can do for yourself is to be flexible with dates and location.
It is entirely possible to find cheap flights when you have a mindset of traveling anywhere versus traveling somewhere specific. A week long round trip flight from Bentonville to Boston is going to cost nearly $700, but for the same exact dates you can fly round trip to Miami, Florida for $266. If you can be flexible with your dates then that can also save you money! Using the “whole month” feature on Skyscanner rather than setting a specific date will show you the best deals for that entire month. This is great for teachers who are off during the summer!
What if I Know My Destination? How Can I Get a Cheap Flight?
Finding a cheap flight to a specific destination you need to go to can be tricky, but it can be done! Still using Skyscanner and embracing flexibility, one could find very cheap flights just about anywhere. Here’s how I did it.
So I am moving to New Zealand this year on the Working Holiday Visa. Flights are extremely expensive, especially from my home base in Bentonville, Arkansas (XNA). We don’t have an international airport and it’s a landlocked state in the middle of the United States. Auckland (AKL) is typically the cheapest New Zealand city to fly into, and a one-way flight from XNA to AXL costs anywhere from $1,200 to $1,500. That’s way over the budget I want to spend on a flight!
I knew there were other U.S. cities that were able to get to Auckland for much cheaper, but I didn’t know exactly how…yet. So I used Skyscanner and was hoping they had an everywhere feature for the departing location but they didn’t. However, I was able to find that you can put an entire country though! So I entered the United States and it searched for all the cheapest US flights to New Zealand in the month of September.
Search the entire country for a departing location on Skyscanner
It populated a flight list showing lowest to highest. Honolulu was the cheapest at $305, but I knew there wasn’t a good chance of me finding a cheap flight to Honolulu from XNA. My best bet was San Francisco and at the time of purchase, I actually got a flight for $487!
Before I purchased the flight, I did research the cheapest ways to get to San Francisco. What I did was I looked into trains, buses, renting a car, etc. I was able to find a flight to San Francisco for about $200 from XNA. I need to stay in the bay area for a few days, but that works perfectly because it a city I’ve wanted to visit! So in total, I’m going to New Zealand from Arkansas for about $700 and I get to visit a new U.S. on top of that.
