Find the Cheapest Weekend With This Tool
A lot of the trips I take, especially the trips I take to visit my family all over the country, take place at relatively random times. There is no reason why I need to be home one weekend instead of another, I just picked one, looked at the prices and booked the flight.
If you have plans to go on holiday “sometime” this summer, but you have not quite decided when the site WeekendFlights will help you narrow down the range of options. A site specifically geared towards weekend travel, you can specify a starting point and destination, and then compare the cost of a direct round-trip ticket for a long weekend.
It’s not ideal: when I tried to find flights from San Francisco to RDU, my hometown airport, there were none. There are no direct flights on weekends, so it makes sense, but still a little annoying that the service does not work at all when the number of flights is limited.
However, a similar search for SFO in Las Vegas worked great. Dates are displayed on the calendar and are color-coded so you can quickly take a look at the results and see which weekends would be good to travel (they are marked in green), questionable weekends to travel (they are marked in yellow) and bad weekends to travel (they are marked in red ).
When you find a weekend that you enjoy, you can click on the price next to it to see what weekend options you have in terms of flight. The lowest fare was listed on the homepage, but there are other more expensive options listed on click if you have airline preferences.
You can do something similar with Google Flights . With it, you enter your starting point and destination, and then click the “Price Chart” button to see the prices for the next few months in a chart. The WeekendFlights bonus is that it limits your results to weekend and direct flights and is color coded to make it easier to pick out winners. However, if you are going to fly anytime during the week, not just the weekend, and want to make multiple connections, then Google Flights may be your best bet.
And, as with all airline ticket purchases, it’s always a good idea to do a little shopping comparison before buying. I’ve been very lucky in the past to find the cheapest flights for my needs on Google Flights, but there is still a couple of wild cards sometimes where you can do a deal somewhere else for a few dollars less.