Book Flights

Although not as full featured as others, Google Flights will get you the most quickly from "that looks like a 🔥 place to take ig pics" to actually seeing flight prices. How? By being extremely fast and easy to use, so typical Google. Intuitive price visualizations and price tracking alerts help further ensure you're getting a good price. At the very least, it's the best place to start your search.

Among aggregators, Momondo consistently scours the most sources and finds the lowest prices, including for multi-city itineraries. Their Flight Insight tool is also a really nifty and unique way to understand how factors like seasonality, airport, day of the week, and others affect price. Our favorite for further comparing.

A good comparison of 25 flight searches showing how well Momondo does.

Have really specific flight needs? Kayak's abundant filters and flexible date inputs help you get really granular to find the right flight. Its price forecast feature based on its massive amounts of data is also really helpful on deciding when to book.

Skyscanner generally finds low prices but where it really shines is when you're flexible on when and where you're going. For dates, it lets you search entire months vs. specific days. For destination, you can put 'Everywhere' and it'll rank places by price. Between these two it's impossible to not find the right flight to satisfy that travel bug 🐞.

Airfarewatchdog lets you set flight alerts from city-to-city, from a departure city, or to a destination city. However, you can't set specific dates so it's the best for people who are flexible and just want to be in the know on destination specific deals. Deals are less 🤖 and more 👫: they're verified by actual analysts instead of being based purely on data since flight prices are ultimately still an inexact science.

Know where and when you want to go but aren't sure when's the best time to buy? Hopper will tell you. They use a data centric approach that analyses billions of flight prices daily to predict the best time. Hopper is also smartphone only, no email alerts. They think mobile push notifications help people act faster to lock down deals, which makes sense. It's a more modern approach to airfare deals and the apps themselves are a joy to use.

Although The Flight Deal's website seems spammy (to the point where you might question it's authenticity 🤔), the deals they find are among the best with detailed breakdowns on how to book. They're mainly for flights from bigger cities in the US and are short lived so it's important to jump on them fast.

Set the city you want to depart from and this service will email you great international flight deals. The catch is there's two levels: free and premium ($5/month). Premium provides more deals and earlier notice, which can be crucial. As long as you're patient and flexible, there's money to be saved regardless of the tier.

A hidden-city flight is where you get off at a layover instead of the final destination. This can save you a lot of money because they're often cheaper than direct routes.

However, it's not without its risks and ethical dilemmas:

• You can't check luggage since it'll end up at the final destination
• If your flight is cancelled, delayed, or rerouted it'll be a painful adventure figuring out how you may get to your intended layover destination
• Airlines hate it (to the point they sued Skiplagged) and will penalize customers who do it often so you may have to book with one you don't want to fly with again
• It can wreak havoc on flight prices and schedules if too many people do it since systems will see so many seats are empty or they think someone is late to their connecting flight, inconveniencing others

If price is that high of a priority for you though, it's worth a try.

A stopover is when you stay longer than 24 hours in a given international city vs. a layover which is only 30 minutes to 23 hours. AirWander is a beautiful tool for finding stopover destinations that you can add onto your trip for free or cheap. For example: if you're flying to London you could spend a few extra days in Barcelona for not much more money.

You can do this with other flight searches but it's a lot more work. There's also no real risk unlike hidden city ticketing. Always worth a look.

Shit happens and sometimes that means you end up not being able to take your planned trip. That sucks, but what sucks even more is having to eat the entire cost. TransferTravel saw an opportunity here and created a marketplace where people can sell their unwanted travel plans with others who wanted great last minute deals. If you're flexible/spontaneous, it can be a really affordable way to travel.

If you're a nomad or just extremely spontaneous, you might travel to a country without knowing where you're going next. Problem with that is many countries don't allow a tourist to enter without proof of onward travel. You could buy a ticket yourself and then cancel it within 24 hours or longer but it's a bit risky especially if there are fees not to mention dealing with airlines is never a smooth ride. FlyOnward solves this by helping you easily rent an onward ticket that's completely valid for just $9.99.

Flystein employs a team of travel experts that'll use their in depth knowledge of airline revenue management practices like fuel dumping and loopholes to help find you the lowest price possible. Always choose their "Beat my price now" option, otherwise you're likely leaving money on the table.

While Flightfox is similar to Flystein, they also have a big focus on the more complex needs of business travelers. For personal travel, there's no need to select a special "beat my price" option as that's the standard way they take trip requests which is nice.

SeatGuru shows you a flight's seat map with reviews for specific seats and general indications of which ones are good or bad. It's a quick and easy way to help you find the best seat (or to at least avoid a bad one).

ExpertFlyer is like SeatGuru but on steroids: it overlays SeatGuru's ratings on top of the real-time airline seat data so you can see whether the good seats for a specific flight are still available. You can even set alerts for on your phone for when these seats become available.

For basic alerts it's free, but for advanced features it does cost money. For frequent travelers, we can see it being worth it.

This straightforward calculator will tell you how much carbon emissions your flight or drive created.

There are a lot of carbon calculators, so why'd we choose this one? First, we wanted the calculation to be reasonable. After trying out 6 different recommended ones, ClimateCare's was in the middle. Second, ClimateCare is frequently cited as one of the most reputable climate change organizations.

Take the carbon amount ClimateCare's calculator gave you (in tonnes) and then stick it into NativeEnergy's "Buy Now" option on the top right. Check out and you're done!

Why did we choose NativeEnergy? It's frequently cited by high reputation organizations like the Sierra Club as one of the best carbon offset vendors: they have high impact projects and are transparent.