Buying an airplane ticket

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Article updated on 04.05.22

Every trip across the ocean begins with the purchase of a plane ticket. The questions we often ask ourselves are: when to buy it? How to buy it? Where to buy it? Then you go on the internet to check the prices once… twice… and then you see that the prices have already increased… you have to hurry.

Not so fast! We give you some tips from our experiences and research that may be useful to you.

Buy a round trip ticket or just one way ?

Depending on the duration of your trip, you may not know the date of your return and you only need a simple way. Know that it sometimes happens that a return flight is more interesting than a simple one. If you choose this option, take care of the aviation company that the cancellation of plane ticket be free and at no cost .

Do not hesitate to go see the experiences of other travelers with aviation companies by going to watch the comments they left (Google, Tripadvisor, etc.)

For us, for example, we were going to book a plane ticket with the Condor company which offered more attractive prices and quickly gave up, because we read several comments that said their after-sales service was not at the top. To cancel your plane ticket, you had to call them, spend long minutes waiting for a response and the call costs were very high. With KLM, we have read that the cancellation was done from our customer account in a few clicks (we cross our fingers that this is the case;)). The choice was therefore quickly made. We preferred to pay our tickets a little more to ensure ease of cancellation when we are in the USA.

Cancellation of the return ticket: When you cancel your return ticket, don’t forget to ask the airline for a refund of the airport fees, which often represent a nice little sum. There are no small savings ;).

A one-way plane ticket ?

Depending on the destination you choose, it may not always be possible to travel with a one-way ticket. In the United States, for example, it is likely that you will have to report your return flight date when you pass through customs.

This is where platforms like onewayfly.com will intervene. They offer you a service of renting a plane ticket for a short period of time (a few hours or a few days). By using this service, you will receive a real ticket, corresponding to a real reservation in your name. This ticket will only be used so that you do not have to justify to the customs why you do not have a return ticket. This solution can sometimes work better than buying a round trip flight that you will not use to return. It will cost between 12 and 30 dollars depending on your needs.

When is the best time to purchase a plane ticket? ?

We often ask this question and according to many blog posts we’ve read, it would be best to buy your ticket at the beginning of the week (Monday to Wednesday), in the early morning. Is this true? Hard to say… but that’s what we do.

Airline ticket price comparator

Skyscanner is the preferred solution. Personally, we prefer to use the option that Google offers, which is « Google Flight ». It allows you to compare prices of airlines as well as prices between destinations.

The disadvantages of Skyscanner are that it does not offer all the airlines and there are a lot of advertisements on their pages.

Google Flight lists all flights and airlines for a more accurate comparison.

Private browsing but not only... use a VPN

To begin with, what is a VPN? It’s a tool that allows you to surf on search engines without recording any of your data and especially to simulate your location in another country. We are not going to describe all the advantages, there is a lot of documentation about it (for example on the blog of Novo-Monde in french) What is the link between the purchase of a plane ticket and a VPN? Two interesting points:
  • Plane ticket prices change depending on where you are searching from. The VPN will allow you to simulate your search from another country and to have access to other prices which can sometimes be more advantageous.
  • The sites that sell airline tickets will not be able to store your data, so whether you check the prices once, twice, three times, they will remain similar.
We don’t currently have a subscription on a platform that offers this service, but we do use the Opera search engine which offers a classic VPN integrated in the search bar.
To activate the VPN on Opera, go to Preferences > scroll down and click on “Advanced” > in the VPN section, activate it. Then you will have your VPN on the left side of the search bar and you can define if you want to use it or not.

So to sum up, to buy your plane ticket, you download Opera, you activate the VPN, you open a private browsing window, you choose the “best location” option and you can start your research in peace.

The local travel agency

From time to time, it is worth looking into a travel agency in your city to ask them for a quote. Sometimes they have access to preferential rates. In addition to paying a little less for a plane ticket, you’ll be running small local businesses. 😃

Here are some tips that we hope will help you. Don’t hesitate to comment on this article if you have any questions or if you have any other tips.

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