How to Find Cheap International Flights: 8 Strategies That Actually Work
Skip the myths. Here are 8 proven strategies for finding genuinely cheap international flights — including the one most travellers overlook.
Everyone has a cousin who swears by booking on Tuesdays at 3am. Ignore them.
Finding cheap international flights comes down to a few structural realities about how airlines price seats — not folklore. Here's what actually works.
1. Be flexible on destination, not just dates
Most flight search tools ask you to pick a destination first. That's backwards if your goal is saving money. The cheapest approach is to start with a budget and let the prices tell you where to go.
Tools that show you a map of fares from your airport are useful for this. So is anything that lets you search "from London, under £600 return, anytime in October."
NearMiles is built around this exact approach — enter your origin, budget, and trip length, and we show you every destination you can realistically afford.
2. Fly to secondary airports
London has six airports. Paris has two. Rome has two. Flying into or out of a secondary airport (Stansted vs Heathrow, Beauvais vs CDG) can cut fares by 30–50% on the same route.
The trade-off is ground transfer time and cost. Do the maths: a £40 saving on the ticket that costs £35 and 90 minutes in an airport bus is not always a win.
3. Split your itinerary
A flight from Manchester to Bangkok via Amsterdam might be cheaper than Manchester to Bangkok direct — but you have to book both legs separately. This is called "self-connecting" and it carries risk (if the first leg is delayed, nobody is responsible for your second flight), but the savings can be substantial.
Only do this with enough layover time (3+ hours for international connections) and when the legs are on separate tickets with different booking references.
4. Search in incognito mode — but it probably doesn't matter
The myth: travel sites track your searches and raise prices when you look again.
The reality: airline fares change constantly due to yield management algorithms, not because a website saw your cookies. That said, searching in incognito costs nothing and rules out any cache-related quirks. It's worth doing.
5. Set fare alerts, then wait
If you have flexibility on exact travel dates, set alerts for a route and check back over 4–6 weeks. Most international routes see periodic dips — sales, seat releases, competition responses — that disappear within hours.
Google Flights alerts are reliable. So are Skyscanner's price alerts for budget carrier routes.
6. Use points for the right routes
Airline miles and credit card points are not always a good deal. On short-haul flights with cheap cash fares, the redemption value per point is often poor. Points earn their value on:
- Long-haul business and first class
- Routes with consistently high cash prices (transatlantic, transpacific peaks)
- Last-minute bookings where cash prices spike
For economy short-haul: pay cash. For transatlantic in business: almost always use points.
7. Book 6–8 weeks out for short-haul, 3–5 months for long-haul
These are rough medians, not guarantees. The research consistently shows that fares tend to be lowest in this window — close enough to avoid the premium on early bookings, far enough out to avoid last-minute price spikes.
The exceptions: peak travel dates (Christmas, school holidays, major events) should be booked earlier. Shoulder season travel can sometimes be found cheaply even a few weeks out.
8. Check the airline directly after finding it elsewhere
Aggregators like Google Flights and Kayak are excellent for discovery. But once you've identified the flight you want, check the airline's own website. Direct bookings occasionally have exclusive fares, and the refund/change process is simpler when there's no intermediary.
The common thread in all of these: flexibility. Flexibility on destination, dates, airports, and routing is worth more than any trick or tool. The travellers who consistently find the cheapest fares are the ones who know what they want (the experience) but hold the specifics loosely (the exact how).
NearMiles starts from that flexibility — if you haven't tried searching by budget yet, start here.