How to Get Cheap Business Class Tickets to Europe

 

Hey, are you hoping to learn all the secret tricks that travelers use to Get Cheap Business Class Tickets to Europe ? Well, you're going to know all my best tips and tricks that I personally use to save hundreds, even thousands of dollars on flights and stick to the end and I'll even give you a free checklist with everything you need to do every time you book a flight. I will help travelers like you travel Europe smarter, cheaper, and more off the beaten path.

Today we are diving deep into one of my favourite topics ever, which is how to scheme your way to cheap flights to Europe.
Here are my top 10 tips for finding cheap flights to Europe.

1. Use Services to get free Discounts and cashback

how to get instant discounts and cash back on your flights. So this is a really quick tip. If you didn't know this already, there are a bunch of really great free websites out there and services that help you get instant discounts on your trips and purchases online. So the first one is one called Honey.

It is a Google Chrome extension that you can install for free with like two clicks. And basically what it does is it scours the web for coupon codes and then automatically applies them at checkout. So if there is a coupon code that exists out there on the internet that's relevant to what you're purchasing, essentially it'll just add that on top and saves you a lot of legwork and it's like free money.

2. Rakuten

You might know it as Ebates and essentially it's a free cash back website that allows you to get money back on purchases that you make online. So the way it works is this, if you make a purchase through their website on any of the vendors that they're partnered with and there's hundreds of them, essentially you'll get anything from two and a half percent to 10% cash back just by shopping through their link and you'll get all this money deposited straight into your PayPal.
I know it sounds suspicious that I've used it and it's totally legit and free to use. So those are two really great services to sign up for if you want some instant discounts and instant cashback.

3. Deck Out Your Cheap Flight Toolkit

The airline industry has changed a lot over the past few years, and so these days you don't just log onto one airline, search it up and hope for the best. Instead there are literally dozens of different services and aggregators that exist for the sole purpose of helping you find the best deal.

• Skyscanner 

  So this is one of those OG flight aggregators that have existed for a very long time. I personally used it for five years and have not looked back. Mainly because I am a millennial and I fear change. Besides that though, it has a lot of really neat features that you can take advantage of. My personal favourite being the everywhere option. It allows you to enter just your departure airport and then a vague destination like everywhere or like a country and it'll show you all the best deals. And another great one is a calendar tool which lets you browse all the different flights on a very pretty colour coded calendar. It's very satisfying to look at. 

• Airfarewatchdog 

  Now this site has a lot of different features and a lot of different things going for it. And my personal favourite is the deals page. So here you can enter your home atand departure airport and then just look at all the different flight deals for a certain time period departing from that airport. So most of the time these deals are for, of course, places that are close to you, so if you're in North America, then most of the time it's showing you other cities in North America. But if you keep scrolling, you will find amazingly cheap flights to different parts of Europe.
  

• Secret Flying 

  Secret Flying is probably the only reason I still use Facebook because they are this amazing website that essentially aggregates all the best troubled youth from around the world, including airfares, cheap fares, all sorts of great stuff. Another alternative if you live in the U S is Scott's Cheap Flights. I've heard a lot of great things about this. Unfortunately most of their deals seem to be for the U S so I don't use them very often and feature to keep an eye out on local websites as well. For me personally, as someone from Vancouver, YVR Deals is a website that collects deals specifically related to the Vancouver. So check if your city has one.

• Google Flights 

  Google flights has incredible functionality and it's definitely one of the best websites that you can use for finding flight deals. Now, some of the things that I really love about Google flights include the fact that with the search engine, you just have so many different functions and capabilities. For example, you can enter up to five different departure airports and up to five destination airports and search them at the same time. You can even organize all the different dates according to this cool matrix and it'll show you the overlap where you'll find the cheapest fares. You can also make use of the everywhere map and this everywhere map is really cool.
  

4. Know the Budget Airlines in your Area

so I know what you're thinking. Once upon a time, air travel used to be so glamorous and so classy. Unfortunately times have changed and now low cost airlines kind of dominate the space and it's great because it's really opened the doors for travel and made it a lot more accessible. On the other hand, now flying, you know, with these airlines you don't exactly get the best experience although you do get the best fares. So what I would say is really familiarize yourself with which budget airlines, if any, operate from your home airport. For me personally, Westjet, which is a Canadian airline, flies frequently from Vancouver to London and Paris. But you should also look up other big names in the budget. Airline industry, some big ones include Air Transat, which is another Canadian company. There's also Eurowings who's German and they fly to the U S and there's also Norwegian, which is probably one of the biggest names in the low cost space. And I've flown with them before and their service is actually pretty good for a low cost airline. So be sure to familiarize yourself with the different budget airlines that are available to you.

5. Embrace Flexibility

Now this tip isn't for everyone. I know there are certain instances in life when you really don't have that much say over your dates or your destination, but if you do have the luxury of flexibility, one of the best ways to guarantee a cheap flight is really to have flexibility over your destination and over your dates and so some of those tools that I discussed earlier are really great for that.
Some general rules of thumb to stick with though: you should try to avoid holidays and weekends if possible. That's just because you know the demand really goes up during those periods, but the one exception is if you want to travel during the holidays, you'll often be able to find a really good deal actually on the holiday date itself, so like Christmas day or new year's day because nobody really wants to fly on Christmas so you can take advantage of some cheap deals then and also picking those crappy time slots that nobody really wants to fly during.

6. DIY your Own Stopover

So this is a technique that I have used many, many times to score cheap flights to and from Europe and this is basically to fly into the cheapest airport possible and then going to your final destination in Europe from there. And the reason why this makes sense, it's just because traveling within Europe is very, very cheap. Once you get to Europe, there's all sorts of budget airlines, there's buses, there's trains that you can take, and so if you're able to find a very cheap flight into a European city, then you can really take advantage of that flying to that city and then find a cheap flight, cheap train or cheap bus to continue your journey into your final destination.

7. Browse in the local language and currency

The airline that's most commonly linked to this technique is actually Norwegian. So what a lot of people do is they'll go on Norwegian's website, the open up their Google translate on Google Chrome and then they'll browse and try to book their flight in the Norwegian website with Norwegian currency. And I know that sounds really crazy, but actually what people have found is that for some reason the flights can be cheaper when browsing on the Norwegian website and even though it's in a different currency, once you do the whole exchange rate and everything, you still end up saving a pretty significant sum of money. So if you want to try this out the next time you are booking with an airline direct, be sure to change your language and your geographical area and see what happens.

8. Pounce on Error Fares

So these are when airlines literally just make a mistake and put up very cheap flights for people to buy. A lot of the time when this happens, airlines do honour those airfares. So if you're on top of things, you can actually be able to jump on those deals and save quite a bit of money. So where can you find these airfares? Well, some of those websites that I mentioned earlier are actually really great tools for this. So Secret Flying posts error fares quite often as does Airfarewatchdog. We actually have a bonus tip here that I've not seen in a lot of places and that is to look at fare deals and airfares on these websites as a signal to look up other reps. no website is ever going to be able to aggregate every single deal in the universe all the time, right? So essentially what you can do is you can go on these websites, you can see when there's a fare sale, you can see when there's an error fare and realize, this particular airline seems to be discounting its fares for some reason. Maybe they'll have discounts on their other routes. And so you can look that up and maybe you'll be able to find your own deals that way.

9. Try Credit Card/Point Hacking

So I am a complete newbie at this. I only just got my new credit card, which is the AMEX platinum last week. But I want you to know that using credit card points and hacking is not actually as daunting and overwhelming as a lot of people seem to think. So. I'll give you an example with the AMEX platinum card that I just got. So the reason why I got it is because even though it is a very, very expensive card, actually comes with a welcome bonus, you get 60,000 points and according to the fixed points reward system that Amex uses, 60,000 points is enough to get you a round trip flight from North America to Europe. But you also get $200 travel credit with that. So that lowers the price to 500 so effectively you've gotten a flight to Europe for $500 but there's also a bunch of other perks that come with the card, like free lounge access for the entire year for you and a plus one. It also comes with travel insurance and a lot of other perks like a VIP concierge. So when you look at it that way, it's kind of impossible not to get great value out of the card for the first year.

10. Hidden City Ticketing

So basically hidden city ticketing is this loophole, this travel hack, I guess that people use to get cheap flights. And that is where they book a flight that connects through their final destination and somehow ends up being cheaper and then they skip the last leg of the journey. So imagine I want to travel from Vancouver to London, but those flights are really expensive. Instead what I might do is on my book a flight from Vancouver to Paris that stops over in London. If that flight's cheaper, I'll book that and then just skip the last leg.

The reason this is kind of controversial, despite the fact that it's technically legal, is because airlines really frown upon it and some might say that by doing this you're kind of driving up prices, creating artificial demand and kind of screwing over other passengers. Anyways, you can use this trick at your own discretion. What I will say is that airlines do really frown upon this practice and there has been precedent in the past where airlines have tried to sue a website that was created for the purpose of finding these kinds of fares. So clearly there's a lot of pushback from the industry with this method, and so use it at your own discretion. I personally wouldn't. But that's another tip for you if you want it.
Because that one was a bit of a downer, I do have a bonus tip for you and that is to know your rights. Okay. So this is a thing that most visitors from outside of Europe do not know, but according to called the EU regulation 261/2004, EU passengers on airlines, flying in and out of the EU or on an EU airline have a lot of rights when it comes to flights being delayed. So there've been many, many instances where people I know have actually been on flights that have been delayed by three hours, four hours, and then they have gone on to claim compensation, which they're entitled to and gotten, you know, 600 euros for a delayed flight. And that's basically a free flight.
So if you ever find yourself in a situation where your flight is delayed and you think you might be entitled to compensation, be sure to look into that because you could be leaving a lot of money on the table and a really great free website that can help you with that is called airhelp.com.

So that's How to Get Cheap Business Class Tickets to Europe, thank you for reading to the end I hope this article can help you..