Getting the best airfare is one of the most pressing concerns that travelers have. Whether you're traveling economy business, or trying to upgrade to first class, everyone wants to know how to get the best bang for their buck. So I have what's called the three step process to the best airfare. And that is being prepared and flexible, being subscribed and being networked. So we'll talk about each of those. The first is being prepared and flexible.

And so one of my favorite quotes about travel is that travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world. And I always keep that in mind when I try to make myself more flexible, either with trying to get airfare tickets or while I'm actually traveling. So this idea of modesty and seeing your place in this big wide world and help using that to help me become more flexible. So as being flexible and prepared, one step in preparation is starting to even see where it is that you want to go start researching regions and countries you want to visit next. That way, you can have an idea about places that you might be interested in.

And we'll talk about that with a demonstration of how Google flights works where you can start to explore different regions. And that way, if some amazing deals or sales, flash sales on airline tickets come up, you'll have a sense of that region or that country and whether or not you think you want to book it, right. So I always tell people to start researching regions, there are different means one is on online groups, you can join different online social media and other listservs that are based on travel interests or interest in a particular region of the world. And you can start to hear about what people think or their experiences in these different regions. The other is if you can go the route of guidebooks where you actually read about a specific place in the world? And of course, there's Lonely Planet Frommer's has a series of guidebooks where you can get an idea of what the country is like what would you would do, how much you might spend, where you might stay?

Also, Cora calm is a question and answer forum and a lot of people often post about travel in general, and going or visiting particular countries or region. And then I love this website, every culture calm. It's basically a world encyclopedia where you can find out anything from language to food, to different customs and religion, about any country in the world. So it's a good way to do your research and start getting prepared in your mind. The other preparation is a little more practical in terms of airline travel, and this is for you to actually start to rack up miles by using credit cards, some people including myself, Get these travel reward credit cards so that they can get the signup bonuses with a rack of 25,000 up to 40,000 miles and they can use that towards their airline travel. They also might use that credit card every month to pay certain things that they know they're going to pay off their credit card at the end of the month, but they get miles for every dollar that they spend.

So it's a way to get sort of free airline miles or free money towards your travel by using a credit card, a travel credit card to make purchases that you would already make. And so like I said many of the cards actually give a 25,000 to $40,000 40,000 mile bonus just for signing up. So right there you've got a lot of miles on your hand. A few of the good ones and there are many out there but a few of the good ones are Bank of America's travel rewards card. The Chase Sapphire preferred red card. The Barclays travel rewards card You can do your research, there's a website called nerd wallet.

And they give you information about the latest travel reward cards and which ones are the best and they do comparisons. There's another website called money crashers that does a similar comparison of the best card for that gives you the best bang for your money. And so those websites will be on the lesson for this lecture so that you can download it and explore on your own. Another way of being prepared is to make sure you sign up for frequent flyer reward programs. So if you are going to book a ticket you made you want to make sure that you get credit, so to speak for that travel particularly if it's international long haul flight, you want to get all of your credit for those miles so that again, you can start to collect and accumulate mileage so that you can apply it either for Another ticket or for an upgrade, or to become an elite member of one of the frequent flyer programs.

And so way earlier on when I first started traveling, I used to actually I made the huge mistake, which was to take flights in that sign in a knot, book or check in on my ticket using my frequent flyer miles. So I was literally giving away thousands of miles every trip because I didn't sign in with the frequent flyer program. So it's really important that you sign up for any frequent flyer program. And when you actually buy your ticket and check in that you make sure that it's registered under your frequent flyer number. All right, so that's really important for your preparation. The other thing in terms of flexibility is to make sure that you travel and purchase at the right time.

So flexibility is comes in different forms. One is being flexible with the actual dates that you can leave and so sometimes That may or may not be possible. You might be traveling for work or for a conference or something related to school and have a really tight timeframe. And you can only leave and come back on certain dates. So that's fine. But there are other times where you may actually have a great deal of flexibility plus or minus three days, where you can see if prices change if you book on a different date.

And when I do the demonstration in the next lecture about Google flights, you'll see how you can actually play around with dates and look at the different days of the calendar and do some comparisons. The other thing is that week they travel is often cheaper than weekend travel. Everybody wants to travel on the weekend and people are coming back Monday morning for work. So we get weekday travel if you can fit it in you should look into that. Also off peak travel and this will vary depending on your location. So employees You know, depending on where you are in terms of in relationship to the equator, for example, in South Africa, which is in the southern part of Africa, obviously, winter is actually in July, June, July, August those months, that's a winter, summer it gets really, really, really hot November, December, January and so forth.

Right. So that's different than some of the Western countries and so certain activities that they have their life Safari, the peak time is during the winter, which is a little bit cooler than in their really hot months of their summer, right. So off peak travel there might be in December, January, February, and so forth. So depending on what you want to do so off peak travel is off peak for a reason. Usually it might be due to weather, either really hot or really cold weather or rain or snow or something. So if you're going to explore off peak travel, because of the cheaper prices and the fewer numbers of tourists or whatever, then it's important that you make sure that you can still participate in the activities that you were planning to, that you really want to partake in, right.

So off peak travel can really offer some opportunities for lower airfare and lower activity prices Once you're at your destination. But you do want to do some research to make sure that it's, you know, it's off peak for reasons. So you want to make sure that you'll still be able to enjoy your travel. There have been this law in the airline industry that the best time to actually purchase a ticket was on Tuesday. at a certain time, some would say Tuesday at 3pm. And some would say later on in the evening.

You know, I've actually purchased some tickets on Tuesdays and now there's so much changing that, you know, airline experts say that there's So much that goes into when you can get your best price. But it doesn't hurt to actually start doing your research to see if you were to look up some prices, if you found that there was a lower price if you're trying to purchase on a Tuesday, another really great service or site that I like is yaffa calm, you can actually Book Search for airline tickets, booked tickets. And then they give you alerts, as do many services about when tickets may fluctuate in price when they're expecting to rise in price or drop in price. And if you booked through active and within a certain period of time, the price decreases, you can actually get a refund for the difference. So I think that's really great.

You can sort of have that confidence that okay, the price looks low. I'm interested I want a book, but knowing that if it goes lower after you book, you can actually get a refund. So I think you should check that out. It's a really great service So preparation and flexibility make it easier for you to grab last minute travel deals and sales. Many of the best travel deals are these flash sales or air fares that only lasts a few minutes. So you have to be flexible in order to be able to try to book those.

And so much of what we've talked about before also comes into it. You have to have confronted your fear. Think about it. If at last minute travel deal comes up, are you actually ready to just go ahead and purchase it and, you know, put everything else into place after you purchase it right. That's where some of the pre preparation comes in. You've done some research about different places.

You have your frequent flyer miles you have your credit card mileage, right so the preparation can actually help you to be a little bit more flexible, and it's a really great skill to practice in terms of booking. Ticket when you find out about a sale at the last minute, it's a really exhilarating, exciting process. It's a little bit scary, but some people have gotten great deals. For example, last year, there were some really great tickets from different cities in the US to Dubai, in the UAE tickets as low as $250. So, you know, those are once in a lifetime prices, and those were due to what are called error or glitch fares and we'll talk about that. The other thing you can do is take advantage of layovers to get sort of what you might call a two for one trip.

There are many airlines that have airports, a lot of them in Asia, in the Middle East that have free layovers where you don't need a special visa because you're considered in transit. And you get to do free tours or take a trip a day trip out, side of the airport. And see the city see a little bit of the country. So that's a way to kind of get a look at a country, you know, it's not an extended stay. But you might get a nice tour, you might get a nice view and feel like you've gotten two trips for the price of one. So the other thing, Step two is to be subscribed to price monitoring sites, you want to start to get feedback and information and notification of deals that might be coming up.

So you can do this by actually signing up where you monitor flight prices for specific itineraries and get alerts for them. And there's also a way that you can just sign up so that you can find out about any sale that's happening that for particular itinerary. So my favorite sites are, you know, kayak I've used numerous times I still consider it. a tried and true thing. Favorite Google flights is amazing. And in the next lecture, I'll show you some different things you can do with Google flights.

But you can do so many searches and so many ways to compare prices, get the best deals in terms of price layover, flight, times, and connections and so forth. And then hopper is actually an app and I've used that on my phone where, again, it monitors prices and it notifies you when prices seem to be getting really low or if it looks like prices are going to increase anytime soon. So I have hopper on my phone, I use kayak to get alerts or monitor itineraries as well as Google flights. Another set of sites to subscribe to are those that will notify you of these sort of last minute flash sales in what are called airfares. Sometimes airlines might make mistakes terms of how they price a certain ticket or a leg of a ticket. And it ends up making the price really, really low.

That's what happened with that Dubai flight that I just mentioned earlier, a flight, it's usually at least eight $900 $1,000 ends up being about 250 because of some sort of glitch with the airline pricing and computer system. And so there are a few sites that really keep up with those things or just with last minute sales, flash sales, the airlines might be having, and that's the secret secret flying airfare watchdog and the flight deal. And Skyscanner is similar. It's usually looking at flights originating in the UK. All of these are great. The websites are attached to this lecture so that you can look at them, see which ones you want to subscribe to, and you'll start to start getting notifications of these last minute what we call flash sales or glitch fares.

The third step is to broaden your network of travel enthusiasts. Many of the best deals are had through or found out about through word of mouth, people that you happen to be talking to in person or online, passing on information. They may be subscribed to these different airfare, monitoring or watch sites, and then they want to share it with those in their their network. So broadening your network of travel, fellow travel enthusiasts, there are many ways to do that. One is to join in person groups as well as online travel groups. There are different meetups.

There's a site called meetup COMM And you can meet up for different interests and start to connect with people in your local region. There are local and national travel clubs, where again, people who have similar interests some of them may be focused on a certain age group or travel to a certain region or a certain type of travel like eco tourism or more food or cultural travel. There are tons of groups on Facebook that are dedicated to people talking about travel or moving abroad. And some people actually make really great connections, personal connections through those online groups. There are other online listservs and forums, and also cultural societies like the National Geographic Society has talks and presentations about travel and culture and so forth. And these are ways that you meet other people who share that passion.

When we talked about cultivating the travel mindset. We were talking about this passion for travel. And so these different in person and online travel groups, you meet like minded individuals, and you will start to get the inside information on those last minute fairs those sales that people find out about and they just want to share it with With other travelers. So we have a couple of challenges for you in this lecture. One is so this is your fourth challenge is to subscribe to one of those airfare sites that I mentioned that and you'll get the websites when you look at the attachments for this lecture. But either Skyscanner, airfare watchdog the flight deal, alright secret flying, subscribe to at least one of them so that you're getting a you can set up the specifications if you want daily emails or on a more less frequent basis.

So subscribe to one of those. And then make sure you join a new online or in person travel group. And there's going to be a list attached to this lecture. You may already be a part of one but remember we said we didn't just say start a network, broaden your network. So join a new group. Maybe you're in a job General travel group but you want to start exploring adventure travel.

So look for adventure travel groups or mindful travel or volunteer groups, people who want to go abroad to volunteer, join some sort of new online or in person travel group to help you broaden your travel network. And make sure you write both of those down in your little travel binder or travel notebook, which airfare site you subscribe to, and which group you subscribe to or joined. And the fifth challenge is for you to actually start researching your next destination. So maybe you don't even have any clue exactly where you want to go. But you've heard of some places that people are going to and it sort of piqued your interest. Or maybe you have a region or particular region in mind, and you can start looking at that region, that continent and then further narrowing it down.

But make sure you start to research your next destination. And there's a little worksheet attached to this lecture for you to fill out where you just write down some basic information about the destination that you're interested in going to. That's part of that preparation that will then help you to be more flexible.