Have Flexibility on When You go on Honeymoon? Use These Tools for Finding Flight Deals!

Maybe you’re determined to head straight for the honeymoon immediately after the wedding is over. It is perfectly understandable: you’ve spent months planning and stressing over things such as flower arrangements and decorations for crying out loud! I can’t even begin to explain the amount of relief a bride I know had the morning after the wedding when she said how happy she was to no longer have to plan said wedding. She was so excited to leave for Ireland for her honeymoon that day. But if you’ve got some flexibility as to when you honeymoon, it could save you a ton of money! Here are some resources for finding flight deals when you’ve got flexibility:

1. Google Flights

So we all know about Google Flights. It’s similar to other flight search engines. It also tells you cheaper flights for the next three months. But have you heard about the explore option? Type in google.com/flights/explore and your mind will be blown. Based on the number of days you can get away, your departure city and even region of the world (i.e. Europe or Asia) it will show you the cheapest places to fly and when.

For example, by typing in Cleveland to Europe for 10 days, Shannon, Ireland or Dublin typically show up. Then, click on the cheapest flight, and it’ll show you flights for it. If you can get away at any time after your wedding, you’re good to go for a 10 day European honeymoon! And that doesn’t mean you have to just go the city it shows. Discount airlines are all over Europe, meaning you can fly anywhere for under $100 most of the time from your arrival city. So, in our case, we could take the cheapest flight into Dublin and then use Dublin to fly elsewhere in Europe using discount airlines!

2. Hopper

Have certain dates in mind but the time of day is flexible? Check out Hopper! It’s an app that predicts when flight prices will drop based on the dates you want to fly, so you can book at the best time. It’s the app we used to help book our flights to South Africa back in November last year, costing only $850 per person. It sends an alert to your phone when prices drop so you can book accordingly. Hopper doesn’t have every airline available, especially discount airlines, but I use the app to let me know when the prices drop and then search online for the best deal. Speaking of which, another great resource is below.

3. Skyscanner

Skyscanner is an amazing resource because not only does it allow you to search regions as well, but also it has an array of discount airlines. It even combines non-alliance airlines to get you the real best deal. For example, for our flight to Orlando for our half marathon in January we used Skyscanner to search for a good round-trip flight. It turned out that the best option was to fly down using Frontier and fly home using Allegiant. While not in an alliance together, booking these turned out to save us at least $50 a person! So if you’re looking to fly round-trip to Hawaii, Skyscanner may combine a Hawaiian Airlines flight down and Delta back or whatever is the true best deal.

4. Using your miles!

The beautiful thing about collecting airline miles is that you can fly from any airport, to any airport for however many miles it costs for flying to that region. However, sometimes if you’re booking too late in advance, or for whatever reason, there are times when award availability, particularly award saver availability isn’t present, it’s harder to book.

Now usually if you book far enough in advance you can typically get these mile saver awards. But you don’t want to book a flight without saver availability. The reason being that you will pay more miles for your flights and thus waste your miles. If you don’t see saver miles, you may want to adjust your dates so you can get the best deals for your miles. Be sure to check out milez.biz. It’s an amazing search engine that tells you how many miles you should expect to pay for a trip by an airline.

5. Travel in Shoulder or Low Season

Want to travel to Europe but your wedding is in July? You’re going to be paying top dollar in July and face a lot more crowds. But traveling in May or September will see a decrease in prices and more of that beach-to-ourselves feeling. Or want to see Thailand but don’t want to go during the height of tourism during the Christmas holidays? Go in November and get discounted prices… or better yet, if you’re willing to risk some rain, go during the late summer months into September for the best deals.

While you won’t experience the perfect sunny days of January in Thailand or the hot beaches of the Mediterranean in July, you’ll have less crowds, better costs, and feel more like a local. It’s a win-win as far as being flexible on your honeymoon.

 

How are you planning on saving money on your honeymoon? What are some tricks you’ve found to help? Have you been finding flight deals? Leave comments below! Be sure to share and subscribe!