Cheap flights – popular tricks that… DO NOT work

Who wouldn’t want to save some cash and buy cheap tickets using well-known and popular tricks to reduce the ticket price? Errors in booking systems, using VPNs, clearing cookies, buying on specific days of the week…. There is really a lot of it! Unfortunately, if they all always worked everyone could just use them, which is not the case at all. Moreover, many of them make prices instead of decreasing…. increase!

You have an idea for a trip, you start looking for flights to the place you’ve dreamed of, and a clash with reality occurs right at the stage of looking for tickets. They are simply expensive! Even low-cost airlines do not offer significantly cheaper flights, and after adding at least baggage or seat selection, it can sometimes be even more expensive than with traditional carriers. So you start trying to figure out what to do to make it cheaper. Somewhere you read about something like VPN, someone recommended to buy a ticket on Tuesday and someone else on the weekend after midnight, you fire up your browser in incognito mode, clear cookies…. and nothing works. Others around you keep writing that it works for them, and meanwhile your selected flights suddenly become more expensive overnight, and there is no trace left of the old price. Do you know it?

We know all too well :) That’s why today we will describe to you popular tricks, copied on a massive scale in many articles, which, as a rule, do NOT work.

Behind us, of course, there were many bookings and it was not always possible to buy tickets cheaply. Ba, sometimes we paid more simply for the convenience and comfort of travel. Nevertheless, this does not mean that price does not matter to us. Of course it has, always has and always will. So when we were planning trips and checking flight prices late last year and early this year, we took it as a point of honor to test what popular tricks would actually allow us to buy tickets cheaper.

Unfortunately, although we repeatedly tested various popular solutions, none of them directly lowered the price. From the comments and messages we received from you on our social media channels, it seems that some of you still manage to do this, but what we want to warn you about with this post is that these are rather exceptions to the rule :) Of course it can still happen, but you will lose more time searching, constantly firing up sites from other regions of the world, switching, waiting for other days of the week, than you will actually save. The whole process is quite time-consuming, and to make matters worse, the constant screwing up of traffic on carriers’ websites can make prices skyrocket.

Is it worth trying? If you have the resources to do so, don’t mind that waiting a week may make tickets more expensive, then you can try, but there is no guarantee that the tricks we have listed will work, and in our opinion it is simply a waste of time.

Tricks for cheap flights that don’t work

Uses VPN to get cheaper tickets

One of the most popular and common prompts is to use a VPN. What is hidden under this mysterious acronym? From virtual private network – in very brief writing, the use of this increases privacy and security of Internet use. A VPN allows you to connect to the network using different IPs, including IPs from different regions of the world – which, according to many, results in cheaper tickets. You may find that buying tickets with a German IP will make Lufthansa flights cheaper, or Turkish Airlines flights will be cheaper with an Asian IP. Maybe you just need to change the IP to the region of the country of the airline, the destination country, and sometimes you have to persist and try with completely random IPs. There is some fun…

We have tried many times in the past and never discovered the key to using a VPN so that it actually brings cheaper tickets. Especially for the last few months – monitoring a dozen directions on a regular basis for 2 months, it did not happen that there was anything cheaper connecting through other IPs….

What’s more, it happened that the tickets were more expensive, because there were additional transaction fees, which were not there when buying tickets with Polish IP….

When buying an airline ticket always use Incognito mode

Web browsers give you the option of using the Internet in incognito mode, or private mode. Some believe that switching to this mode allows you to see prices from “anonymous mode” rallies prices not yet shot by constant browsing.

Nothing could be further from the truth! Private mode provides anonymity only in terms of saving a trace of your presence on your device (e.g. there will be no trace in your search history), but already the website or even your ISP knows perfectly well where you were and what you were doing ;) Especially since websites recognize that you enter from incognito mode.

While we are still able to believe that changing IPs can actually help hunt down some lower price, the switch to incognito mode is simply urban legend.

Buying on Tuesday or Wednesday, preferably at 3 p.m.

When we weren’t in a hurry to buy airline tickets, several times we waited until Tuesday or Wednesday, because it WOULD be cheaper then. Fact, sometimes prices change, but we have not noticed that it happens automatically on Tuesday or Wednesday. Moreover, it happened to be cheaper to buy them on Sunday.

And here comes another problem – refreshing the page can make the price of tickets go up. The same will happen if we delay the purchase – there are pools of tickets at specific prices in airlines (probably not all of them, either). If someone before you buys the last ticket from a given pool, you will see more expensive tickets from the next pool.

It is worth noting here that price swapping, even on a daily basis, is completely natural and these are no gimmicks. The most likely ticket prices include. The correlation of airplane filling and the time left until departure (and a million other factors). So it is obvious that the price goes up over time, because someone just happened to buy tickets from a given pool, and in some time it will go down, however, because the price went up too much and a person or a machine reduced the price to encourage others to buy.

Nowadays, the only reason we sometimes wait until Wednesday is Crazy Flight Wednesdays – just in this promotion we once managed to buy good flights (this is no advertisement!).

Errors in reservation systems

It used to be very popular, although it happened that even in the previous year, someone advertised such mistakes as the best way to get cheap flights.

All you had to do was follow online forums, social media groups to get error alerts…. There were, for example, various technical problems, currency conversion errors on both carriers’ and brokers’ websites. Unfortunately, observing the situation over the past few years, such mistakes are becoming increasingly rare. We managed to hunt down such a bug a few times, but that was a good few years ago.

Reservation systems are getting better and better, and it’s really hard to hunt down such a “bargain,” and certainly not in the direction and timing we’ve seen recently.

The truth is also that even if one actually manages to buy a ticket in such a mistake there is a very high risk that the carrier will simply cancel our ticket, and the broker may not even send the ticket. Too risky for us…

Summary

This post was written in the interest of heartening ;) for all those who have so far failed to take advantage of these many, popular tricks. Believe us, they mostly don’t work!

Instead of focusing on constantly refreshing pages, switching IPs, it is better to focus on ways to find cheaper flights, which we will write about in the next post.

And you can see how we saved more than $6,000 on a flight for our family in our rollout on Instagram.

And finally, one more clarification. If you managed to buy a ticket cheaper because you connected through a VPN, and later check that without a VPN the tickets are more expensive, or you bought a ticket on Wednesday and on Thursday it was actually more expensive, that doesn’t mean that these myths work at all. It’s natural that the price of tickets goes up after someone buys tickets from a given pool for a given flight. And you just bought such a ticket :) Also such a version does not count ;)

If you know any TRUE ways to get cheap flights let us know in the comments! :)