6 Mistakes to Avoid When Booking a Flight

Just like you do some window shopping before buying your favourite clothing item, even while booking flights online, you must look around a little. Often people go to a fixed site (that they prefer) and book tickets from there. And that is understandable since different sites offer special discounts to regular customers on some occasions! But hey, you might be missing out on better offers! If you want the best price on your flight, you gotta compare prices and offers on various sites. Some sites may offer a better price, or even better, allow you to compare prices of various airlines on the same page. That is most convenient! Forget prices, if you find the desired flight unavailable on one site, you might find it available on another one!

So, always go through all your options before booking a flight. Here’s another trick for you! One of the smartest flight booking hacks is to sign up for price email alerts. In this, you will be notified via email whenever the price of your intended flight reduces. So, no need to spend hours being hooked to the sites’ screens.

You might be aware of one particular airport in a city you intend or prefer to travel to. But, chances are that there is another alternative airport you don’t know about! And even worse, you could have got a better deal on your air booking to the other airport. Not checking out ticket prices to alternative airports is a common mistake.

When you are searching flight tickets online, make it a point to set the filter to the “all airports” option of a particular city. Then, you will be shown the flights available at all the airports registered under that city code. If you set it to search by one airport code, only flights departing from and landing on that airport will be displayed. That means you might end up not getting a flight at your desired time or not getting the best available fares to your destination.

Many feel not so motivated to check ticket fares before booking a flight and just book one whenever they need. But they can end up booking flights when prices are higher, without even knowing that! If you are travelling for an emergency or immediate work, it’s obviously fine not to wait for the best-priced ticket. But what if you are planning a trip in advance? You can most definitely wait for a little for the prices to go down. We are sure you won’t love to splurge more when you can get the same ticket booked at a lower rate.

The best way to book a flight ticket online at a low price is to keep checking the prices for flights of your intended route. For this also, you can set up email alerts to let you know when ticket prices go down. Now, for the tip! Prices are likely to be lower on the weekdays. And, a last-minute flight will surely cost you more. So, make your flight bookings during the weekdays and in advance.

You can guess that on a Friday or a Sunday the number of vacationers is likely to be higher as people tend to go for trips more on weekends and come back by Sunday night. Besides, many business travellers also return home on weekends. Due to this obvious rush, flight fares rise. Still, trip goers tend to make the mistake of booking flights on weekends. Now, do you want to commit this same mistake or book a flight on a weekday? The choice is yours!

We know travelling on a Tuesday or Wednesday might not be the most convenient option for you. But c’mon, you know you can save a lot more and might get the best cheap flights by going through this slight inconvenience. So, avoid repeating the mistakes of others and don’t book a flight on popular days or the weekends.

In the excitement of getting the best flight offers in terms of the ticket price, we often forget to consider other hidden costs that we might need to incur. And these subsidiary costs might eliminate the costs you saved on the ticket price. Let’s explain in detail. Suppose you have booked a flight ticket at a low price but it doesn’t include baggage fees. You have to bear it separately, thereby your expenditure will increase. So, even while looking for the best ticket price, check if the selected one covers the baggage fees. Besides, you can also check the fees of seat selection on a discounted flight.

Hold on! Price is not everything. Your travel experience also counts, right? So, you might get a low fare flight but that might not include convenient facilities like enough legroom, good entertainment, seatback screens, good food service and much more. So, check whether the cheap flight takes care of your overall convenience. If not, you might not have a comfortable journey due to chasing a low price.

You can’t deny that we have a tendency of ignoring calls from unknown numbers. And that is quite okay! But this can be a blunder if the call was from your travel provider. How? Well, if the provider calls you to inform you about a flight delay or flight cancellation and you don’t receive it, you know what’s going to happen. A blunder, right! Believe us, many have missed their flights or some important notifications associated with their flight timings due to such ignorance.

So, once you book ticket online, be sure that you receive calls from unknown numbers as it might be your travel provider. Also, they might notify you via email. So keep a tab on your email notifications as well.

Now you know the seven mistakes you won’t want to repeat when booking a flight. So, try to keep our tips while you book your flight so that you can grab a better deal on flight bookings. Have a safe and happy journey!