How To Use Google Flights to Find the Cheapest Destinations
Google Flights is an amazing search engine for finding cheap destinations, you just have to know how to use it to your advantage. Of course, finding the truly best price also requires some flexibility to your plans.
When you first open Google Flights, the best way to search for affordable destinations begins by changing your trip to One Way — even if you are ultimately searching for a Round Trip flight.
Once you are in this mode, you can type in departure and arrival destinations. If you do not have a particular city in mind for the country you want to visit, then you can just type the country’s name into the arrival destination. Or, for domestic flights, you can just type in the state name. Don’t forget to change the default travel date to your desired day of departure. This will give you a visual of the prices for each city in that country or state, for one way tickets.
Using this visual of fares, you can select a city and change the fare to round trip. If you have flexible or undetermined plans, you can simply choose the cheapest city to fly into to begin your adventure.
If your plans are so flexible or undetermined that you do not have a final destination yet in mind, you can also use Google Flights to make that determination. You just follow the process outlined above and then zoom out on the map or drag the map around to see prices for different destinations across the world.
You can keep dragging the map around to find the cheapest destination. On the day I wrote this, the cheapest international destination for me was a tie between Guadlajara, Mexico and Calgary, Canada and the cheapest domestic destination was a tie between Portland, Reno, and Boise. Once you select a city, you can switch from one way to round trip and determine your flight dates.
Further Reading: If you want to learn how to book even cheaper flights through cashback and frequent flyer miles, check out my post about how to get rewards for your flights, without using credit cards.
