Using Google Flights

By now you may have played around on Google Flights, especially the Flexible Dates view, and hopefully seen its power. It’s still pretty wide open, though, and, as promised, here are a few tips to get the most out of it.

To Start: Traveling out of BHM airport is usually an expensive proposition. I’ve checked the same for Huntsville and Montgomery. As nice as it is to fly directly out of BHM, it comes at a premium of $300/ticket, I’d say, over other options. The closest to an affordable flight I’ve ever found was $1,050 RT to Paris, and that disappeared in a day. The root cause is lack of competition; flights from BHM are few, and of those, SWA takes up a large number. It would be perfectly lovely and quite possible for Delta to reasonably price in a BHM-ATL-PAR flight, but there’s no competitive pressure for it to do so.

I almost always, therefore, begin my searches in ATL. It’s drivable, obviously, and there are direct flights to most European destinations. You do have to factor the drive and park cost in – as low as $9/day if you use the remote shuttle site, though I often go with the $12/day Economy parking. $100 for a 10 day trip, from $25 gas – it’s a cheap way to go. There are busses that take you from BHM to downtown ATL, but you have to take MARTA to get to the airport from there. $14/person for that…both ways…you come out behind pretty quickly. Only, don’t underestimate how difficult the return drive can be. You’ll have been up for 16+ hours, probably, when you land back in ATL. Be careful.

When you start searching from ATL you’ll notice pretty quickly that ATL-Europe pairs are not particularly cheap, at least not compared to some of the other ads you’ll see. Reasons: again, lack of major competition (ATL is dominated by Delta); lack of a bargain carrier (e.g., Norwegian, more on them later); the extra two hours of flight time compared with, say, NYC departures. ATL-Europe generally starts at $1,000, whereas NYC-Europe can be had for $500 (though you don’t want that flight, more on it later). Oddly, that $1,000 fare usually involves a stopover in the US, usually NYC. So, you’re driving 150 miles and don’t even get a direct connection. Bummer. Direct flights are almost always $200 more.

The best you can hope for with ATL departures is to keep checking and catch one of those odd computer pricing glitches. Last year I found ATL-Paris for $600 in June – this is a good deal. Anything below $700 to continental Europe from ATL is a steal. I consider $800 to be a good purchase. The $600 flight wasn’t ideal, it has a stop in NYC, and the trip length was 8 days max: I like to go for at least 10. We ended up passing on it, but such deals can be had (the driver, btw was an offer from United that was coupled with an AARP discount. Delta matched it for a very short period).

Anyway, ATL remains the first best option, really, in terms of convenience. I set my Google search to “direct flights only” to filter out the Aeroflot routes – if I’m driving to ATL, I count that as one flight, and I don’t want another if I can help it. I usually start looking 4 months in advance; airlines rarely start their pricing games further out (unless you’re using miles, in which case you need to start 330 days out – more on that next week). I think that oil futures are the main reason why airlines won’t discount more than 4 months out, but I’m sure more goes into it. Expect the sales to kick in between 3-4 months out. Google will actually help here, they have a tool that predicts, based on past history, when the best time to buy a certain flight is. The airlines know this, too, and will try to inject some randomness into the process.

Buying when the sales are first announced is a risk-reward proposition. You’ll get the best pick of seats if you buy early, and with luck you’re locking in a decent price. Again, I go with $700 direct to continental Europe as being excellent, $800 as very good, $900 as fair. I don’t go above $900, you can always do better. So if I see $770 to Zurich, I jumps on it.

Wait, what? Zurich? Why am I going there? OK, here’s the point I was trying to make with my previous posts on France/Italy/England: Go into this process with an open mind for your destination, because they’re all good (I haven’t gotten to describing Germany/Switzerland, Spain, Greece, Ireland, Scandinavia yet, but they’re excellent choices, too). I prefer to have top 3 choices for destinations and see if something develops. This year, ATL-ZRH was $300 less than ATL-PAR, so Zurich and southern Germany it is. Two years ago Milan was on sale – and there we go. If you have your heart set on one particular spot, then so be it, but flexibility increases savings.

Back to the purchase. If the initial sale at $800 is not in your budget, you can hold out for a lower price. You may get lucky and score something at $600; you may not. You can always decide that connecting through Istanbul on your way to London is worth-while. I try to minimize connections, and if they must be, at least have them going in the same direction. Amsterdam is, more or less, on the way from ATL to Paris, so you’re not losing a lot of time, I can do that. Other people are willing to route through Dubai to Rome. That’s not for me (unless it’s Emirates business class, in which case, go ahead and make the flight longer).

But you are stubborn, aren’t you? You have your heart and mind set on France. If so, be prepared to make the trip a little less convenient, but I’ll show some strategies that don’t involve stuffing your kids into the overhead bin. Next post.