When to buy your plane ticket? Which comparator to use to find a cheaper ticket? Is making a stopover to reduce the price of the ticket really wise? Do children pay for their full price plane ticket? So many questions that I will try to answer to help you prepare for your trips.
In organizing a stay, the price of the plane ticket remains the most important expense, the one that is difficult to incompress, especially if you are going with your family. However, there are a few tricks to pay less for your plane ticket.
I'm not going to talk to you about leaving outside school holidays. Or tell you about last minute booking, sometimes complicated to organize the rest of the trip when you have children. I won't talk to you about Miles, or accumulating points which, like any loyalty card, means traveling a LOT to save a little. Obviously, I would not advise you to make 3 stopovers of 10 hours each to save you a few euros. I will not tell you to cheat on your age to benefit from the youth rate. Simply, I'm going to tell you about what we do, we, a family of four (2 adults and 2 children aged 8 and 5) to find cheaper plane tickets.
If you have a clear idea of the travel destination that tempts you, it is good to have in mind the average budget of the flight you are looking for. This will save you from wasting time looking for a price that doesn't exist and will allow you to validate your flight at the "right" price. There are sites referencing average flight prices such as Algofly. Otherwise, be flexible and look for a less expensive destination, a destination according to your budget. Be careful, however, of the expenses on site. So you might be tempted by a Paris-New York return trip for 250 euros per person, but what will your expenses be on the spot compared to a trip to Asia where accommodation and meals are cheap? For the price of a fast food in New York, you eat at 4 in Thailand morning, noon and evening!
Obviously the budget of your plane tickets is not the same if you have a baby or 3 teenagers. The advantage of leaving with a child under 2 years old is that he does not pay for his plane ticket (or very little, around 10% of the ticket price), the disadvantage is that he will travel to better in a crib for the little ones, worse on your lap for the older ones. It's kind of the "price to pay" for the savings you'll make. From the age of 2, children pay almost full price and have their own seat. It stings a bit when entering the bank card numbers.
As we already know, the ideal is to travel outside school holidays. It is clearly during these periods that flights are the cheapest. Our daughters are in CE2 and GS and we don't make them miss school because it would be tempting to do so too often. We still try to remain flexible as to our departure or return dates. This saves us a few hundred euros at 4. We use Google Flight in particular to compare the dates and prices of our plane tickets. A return on Thursday or Friday is often cheaper than the weekend. It also allows children a gentle return, a day to rediscover their toys and their room. A day to recover from jet lag before heading back to school or work.
Price chart on Google Flight
Google Flight also allows us to quickly view the price of flights departing from neighboring airports. London-Heathrow, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Brussels and Amsterdam are among the largest European airports. By road or rail, these airports are not necessarily further away than your local airport. This certainly lengthens the transport time but when you can save several hundred euros it is not negligible.
With this technique of booking via secondary airports, do not forget to add the transport costs, parking, hotel that these generate so as not to have any unpleasant surprises in your budget.
Living in the North of France, it happened to us several times to leave London. Despite the price of the Eurostar at 4, the hotel at the airport and meals there and back, this option remains extremely competitive, with sometimes a thousand euros in savings compared to a departure from Paris.
For our next trip (to Mexico!!!), instead of arriving in Cancun like everyone else, we will arrive in Merida. This step does not change our travel plans in any way since we had planned to go there, but it saves us a lot of money!
I did a QUICK search for a flight to Kerala, during the upcoming winter school holidays, on decent times, with decent layover time (less than 3 hours) and with an airline that did its evidence (include Qatar Airways, Etihad or Emirates).
From Paris count 942 euros return trip per person.
From London, you will find a similar flight around 583 euros, or 1436 savings of 4 euros. Even by adding the Eurostar and the hotel on the outward and return journey, you are winners! I have experienced with Costa Rica or Thailand in the same period and the price difference is also clear.
Paris-Cochin 942 euros return trip per person
London-Cochin 583 euros return trip per person
Clearly by extending your flight time and making a stopover, you lower the price of your trip. Of course, you lengthen your journey time, but the stopover has certain advantages over long-haul flights with children. The stopover allows you a small break in the flight to stretch your legs. The stopover allows you to let the children run around before you find yourself stuck in your seat for another 5 or 6 hours of flight. I also invite you to read my article on our 10 tips for traveling peacefully with children.
During your stopovers, be vigilant about the additional costs they generate:additional food expenses or ESTA visa required for the USA. Similarly, do not try to create your flight with a stopover with separate ticket purchases. If your 1st flight is delayed, the next flight company will not be required to find you a flight and your luggage will not follow.
I also did a quick search for a flight to Costa Rica without and with stopover. At 4, the saving is more than 500 euros.
Paris-San José, Costa Rica non-stop
Paris-San José, Costa Rica with one stopover
It is now possible, the European Parliament voted for it this year, you can now buy your flight on the Italian, English or German website of the company and save a few tens of euros. We have already experienced it on a London-San José (Costa Rica) flight via the English site of American Airlines. At the time we had to "cheat" our address for the transaction to go through.
Is it better to buy your plane ticket well in advance or at the last minute?
Compare, search, come back, wait, do not rush. Some would tell you that the IP addresses are tracked and that the more you search, the higher the prices offered. Experience would tell us that flight prices vary from day to day and even hour to hour, it's the law of supply and demand or "yield management" . To put it simply and because it's more complicated than that, the prices vary according to the seats available on the planes (in the case of cancellations for example, the airline prefers to sell its seats cheaper rather than leaving with empty seats), the price of competitors but also the price of fuel, the number of current requests for the same destination… So don't rush, don't regret and wait until you find the right price. A good price seen on Monday may return the following Friday. It would seem that the good average for buying plane tickets is 3 months before departure.
Some flights offer very attractive prices, this is the case of low-cost airlines which have unbeatable prices. In return you often take off and land in small secondary airports. You will have to think about adding the price of the trip to your final destination and this is sometimes not negligible. Other companies, not necessarily cataloged as low-cost, such as Norwegian with brand new planes, also offer the lowest prices, you "only" pay for the plane ticket, it's up to you to know how to do without their extras charged for a few euros extra:meals or luggage in the hold. All those little extras that quickly boost the bill when you're traveling as a family.
So, ready to board? Are you more Thailand or Costa Rica?
