After guests have made their room reservation with us we usually get questions about when would be the best time to book their flights or how much we think tickets would cost from their location.
These are great questions, but impossible for us to answer, since there are so many factors that go into airfare pricing.
Since we don’t make or manage flight reservations for guests we thought we would share a couple tools that we personally use when looking for flights.
You can click HERE to learn more and to download the app to your phone. Here is a great description of the app from a blog:
“Hopper’s signature rabbit may seem a bit childish at first, but this bunny knows its stuff. The flexibility feature is especially useful: put in your home city and desired destination and Hopper will map out the entire year for you with color-coded prices. The dates are shown as month-long calendars, with colored boxes telling you when prices fall into certain categories, like less than $300 or over $500, for example. The app-only service also predicts whether or not the price for your chosen dates may drop or not (they monitor up to 15 billion flight prices per day) and allows you to “Watch the Trip” — a feature where Hopper will send you alerts if the price changes. If you know you need a vacation but are flexible on your destination or dates, you can also set alerts for the app to tell you when there are destinations deals.”
Though this app is great, we would like to bring up 2 concerns we have with the Hopper app. One is that it does not show flights from Southwest or Delta Airlines. This may not be a problem for you but if you want flights from either one of these airlines you’ll have to go directly to their websites.
The second is a bit of a warning. We recommend using Hopper ONLY as a tool to monitor flight prices. We do not recommend using it to book your flights. We would only recommend booking flights directly with the airlines, as we have heard of instances where flight changes are not able to be managed after booking and of other issues experienced with Hopper flights.
The second tool we use is Google Flights. To learn how to effectively use Google Flights here are two great blogs for you to review.
- How to Use Google Flights to Find Cheap Flights – this blog has a great video that explains how to use it.
- How to Use Google Flights to Find Cheap Prices, Discover Destinations (and more) – this blog may be a little more updated.
FYI, Google Flights will show flights but not prices for Southwest Airlines. If you select flights from Southwest it will only give you the option to go directly to their website to check prices and book your flight. It’s also best to open an incognito tab to do the searching. The more you search a flight, the more expensive it can get.
Click on the button HERE to go to Google Flights.
Armed with these great tools, we’re confident that you will find a great flight for your vacation! And don’t forget to use up any unused flight credits or points that you may have.
