Sign up for flight price alerts. 

Travel doesn’t have to involve flying, but it so often does that I wanted to start my weekly travel tips with this important step.

Every year there are more and more great services that will help you find flight deals. Sometimes a credit card that you already have has travel services. Here are my three favorite services, with their pros and cons.

For all three of these services, you need to have any idea of either where you want to go, or when you’re going to travel.

1.     Google Flights

2.     Going

3.     Hopper

How to use Google Flights

Google Flights has a great service called Flight Tracker that will notify you if a flight you’ve looked at has a change in price. First, search for a flight and check if the price is rates as being low or high. If you’re not ready to buy, check the Track Prices button. Google will notify you if the price goes down.

How to use Going

This is a great service that used to be called Scott’s Cheap Flights. They started rebranding in 2022 and have made some great changes. Note, this service only works well if you’re in the US. You have to sign up, which does make it a step more complicated than Google Flights. There is both a free version and a paid subscription service. Unless you have a few trips lined up and are sure you’ll use it to find cheap flights, I suggest starting with the free version. Play around with it for a trip or two and if you like it, then consider the paid subscription.

How to use Hopper

I have to start with a disclaimer that I used Hopper to buy more than twenty flights and loved the service, then had two terrible experiences with them in a row. I won’t buy a flight through Hopper again, but I still use their free flight tracker to find cheap flights.

 I hope this was helpful!

Please leave a comment below if you have a question about these three flight trackers or if you want to suggest another flight service that I didn’t cover here.

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