What We Spent on Flights Around the World + 5 Tips for Booking Cheap Flights

I’m going to start this post with a little secret. Full disclosure, our budgeting process is not a precise affair. You won’t find stacks of data that we’ve combed through. No endless Google searches on average travel costs. But we have traveled a fair amount and we used that experience to make educated guesses on the amount we thought we would spend traveling for a year. We knew that setting a budget and working towards it was important to us. Especially because we wanted, and needed, some boundaries to make destination decisions and limit our wanderlust.

Yet, when it came to our flight budget we were a little stuck. Flights are usually about half of the cost of an entire international trip for us! On our trip to Italy in 2017, we spent $4k on flights alone for our family of 4. We knew that we needed to get educated on how to score cheap and, sometimes, FREE flights!

For our year of travel, we gave ourselves a flight budget of $7,000. What?! How did we think that number was even possible when we spent $4,000 on one set of round-trip tickets to Italy? Well, we wanted an ambitious goal to push ourselves to learn the skills of scoring cheap airfare. And guess what? It worked! At the end of our travels came home spending… drumroll…

$6,576!!!

18 flights from the United States to Europe to Asia back to Europe and then back to the US and places in between. We think spending 7 thousand dollars on flights for a family of four is amazing. So how did we do it? Below are some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way!

If you’re interested in learning more about how we designed our around the world budget then my book How to Travel the World: Long Term Travel Planning may be right for you. 200 pages packed with travel planning details from my countless hours of research and compile in one book for you to plan your dream adventure!

1. Credit Card Points - ok, a HUGE way we accomplished this goal was the use of credit card points to purchase flights. Trent and I are both Chase Sapphire Reserved cardholders. We opened cards the year before we began traveling and I wish we would have opened them earlier. We would have spent next to nothing on airfare!

2. Norwegian Airlines - Norwegian Airlines is a budget airline that we’ve traveled with often. They’re known for their super cheap flights to Europe. You can go from the US to cities in Europe for around $100! The catch is that the flight back to the US is usually much more expensive. Since we only needed a one-way flight to Europe to start our trip, we scored 4 tickets to London in the peak of travel season for $914. That’s only $228/person!

3. Local Budget Carriers - Within continents, we used well-known budget carriers in the area, like Easy Jet and Air Asia. Usually, the earlier you book, the cheaper the flights are for these budget airlines. Sometimes you can score RyanAir flights for 49 cents (in euros)! If you’re flexible, here’s a great way to take advantage of budget carriers. Book the cheapest non-stop flight to the region that you are visiting and then book a budget airline to connect to your destination. Many times flights to London or Frankfurt are the cheapest. You can easily find an inexpensive second flight to wherever your final destination may be!

4. Fly Midweek - We almost always fly midweek when prices see big dips. We also try to book more than 6 months in advance of our departure. Finally, your booking day is often as critical to your price as the day you travel. Search for flights and book them on weekdays when most people are at work, not planning their next vacation.

5. Don’t Bundle - We rarely choose the meal, baggage, seat choice bundle option on budget airlines. We usually add on baggage as needed, take on our own food, and, fingers crossed, find seats together. (They usually seat families together automatically.) Also, we always add on baggage before going to the airport. Baggage fees are usually more expensive at the airport. For one flight, we went to the lengths of finding a Thai Lion ticket booth at a nearby mall to add on baggage since we couldn’t do it online and they couldn’t take a non-Asian credit card over the phone. It was worth it because we paid half the amount in baggage fees!

I hope that our lessons and countless hours of online research help point you in the right direction to save big on your next flight!