Flights to Hawaii can be expensive! But that's not always the case. Deals can be found - if you know where to look and how to use certain travel tools to your advantage. I'll break things down into a few different categories: travel deal pages on social media, optimizing your use of travel websites, other travel website tips and tricks, and using travel tools to your advantage.
Travel Deal Pages on Social Media - over the last few years, a handful of pages such as CheapDFW on Facebook have really taken off (pun intended). These pages are on the constant hunt for great travel deals for specific airports and publish these deals/fares on their social media page. CheapDFW, for example posts great flight deals for both Dallas-Fort Worth Airport and Love Field. I have gotten many great deals from them over the years to Hawaii, other states, and internationally as well! CheapDFW has several 'sister sites' that serve other cities such as Houston, Austin/San Antonio, New York/Newark, Chicago/Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Phoenix. They also have their own website at www.cheapdfw.com. There are also websites you can pay a subscription to that others swear by such as Scott's Cheap Flights.
Optimizing Your Use of Travel Websites - the amount of sheer functionality that has appeared in travel websites and search engines over the last few years is overwhelming. However, some of this can be used to your advantage if you know what you are doing. For example, if you get on Google Flights, you can type-in "Hawaii" as your destination and it will automatically show you airfares to all the Hawiian islands. Be careful of flights it shows that are cheap because they have an extremely long trip duration - you will want to filter those out. In Google Flights, when selecting the flights, if you don't have specific dates in mind, you can select "Flexible Dates" and it allows you to choose a 1 week, 2 week, or weekend trip in the next 6 months, or a specific month. This is an incredible tool to find the cheapest airfare for Hawaii (or anywhere else). On Google Flights, using specific or flexible dates, you can also just type in your home airport and leave the destination airport blank and you can find cheap flights to anywhere.
Other Travel Website Tips And Tricks - when searching for airfare, it's a good idea to use an incognito window on Google Chrome as some airlines and travel websites will track you and artificially inflate their prices as they see you looking at the same flight(s) multiple times - I've seen it happen firsthand. Another great travel tool is Google's ITA Matrix Airfare Search. https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ This is a separate site from Google Flights and you can not book flights directly from the site. However, this is a powerful tool. Aside from having the functionality to search for flights with flexible dates of +/- 1 or +/- 2 days (just like Kayak or other travel sites) this site allows you to search for a calendar of low fares and you can specify a specific or range of amount of nights you want to spend at that destination. Game changer. A couple of other important things to note: Southwest Airlines does not show up in any travel websites / search engines - you can only see their flights/fares through their website. Finally, be open to the fact that two one-way flights, every once in a while, can be cheaper than round-trip flights. Google flights and some other travel websites are now getting keen on this and are showing results that include and allow you to book two one-way fares. Good deals can also be had flying one airline outbound one-way, and a different airline inbound one-way. Sometimes I have to be creative if that forces me to fly out of DFW and back into Love Field or vice versa, but it can be worth it!
Using Travel Tools To Your Advantage - First off, if you are not a member of a frequent flyer program - you should be! You may as well be earning miles with these air carriers as well as other perks along the way. There are a number of airline co-branded credit cards out there that I also recommend you look into if that fits into your financial picture. For example, I have the Citi American Airlines AAdvantage Platinum Select Mastercard. There's usually a generous sign-up bonus - I'd not settle for less than 60,000 miles, and I've seen as high as 65,000. (Edit: A day after posting this, they have upped the sign-up bonus to 75,000 miles for a limited time offer!) Further, there's usually a lot of ways to earn extra miles and quick routes to earn status with an airline. For example, I have Platinum Status with AA which comes with a multitude of perks such as two free checked bags per person, complimentary upgrades to first class, same day flight changes, priority check-in, priority boarding, priority security screening, priority bag delivery, a special phone number for customer service, and much more. For every $1 spent you earn 1 mile - plus you get 2 miles for every $1 spent on groceries and gas. We pay all of our bills and practically everything else through this credit card and then pay it off in-full every month. If you are really sensitive about reporting to credit bureaus, you can pay off your card in-full twice a month. It's also a great way to build credit. When we travel we always book flights with it. As a result, we rack up a lot of miles. These miles can be used to pay for flights. We have flown many flights to Hawaii and elsewhere on award tickets - all just for using our credit card. We chose the American card because we live in the DFW area and American Airlines has their hub here at DFW airport - so there's a ton of flight availability here with them. Southwest also has a hub here at Love Field. You may want to consider choosing a co-branded credit card based on what airline(s) serve your local airport(s) and what destinations they serve that you may frequent.
Two other great travel tools are TSA Pre-Check and Global Entry which we will discuss in future articles/posts.
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