While travelling to a foreign country, sometimes you may be lucky to find cheap international flight tickets for your onward journey to that destination. However your return date may not have that same flight or the fare could probably even be twice as costly as your onward trip. So now you’re faced with a dilemma of how to get Cheap International Flight Tickets .
How to get Cheap Flights from Dubai to Chennai?
If you a book a flight from Dubai to Chennai in FlyEmirates or FlyDubai , you’ll be given a ticket fare in AED(Arab Emirates Dhirams) and that could be expensive. In my case , I was able to get a oneway ticket as low as 7500 rs(all inclusive) from Chennai to Dubai. But when I was seeing the Dubai to Chennai fares it went up to 1100 AED (Rs.20,000 per person) and this blew up my budget.
So I came up with a simple travel hack that could help me save substantially while booking international flight tickets and hence sharing with my readers. A friend of mine had asked me if I could a find cheap ticket from Dubai to Chennai for a week later. Almost all the flights including Emirates, FLyDubai, Jet Airways, Spicejet had fares exceeding 21K mark and this was not affordable. Sites like Makemytrip, Cleartrip gave me no further options. I even tried nearby airport such as Abu Dhabi(Jet Airways) and Sharjah(Gulf Air) but still same fare only.
How to get Cheap tickets with multi city itinerary?
I realized that there are several flights from Dubai to India that may turn out to be cheap . From there, the domestic flight connecting that city to Chennai may be a lot cheaper.So I tried looking for the following cities in India ( that was geographically closer to Dubai) : Mumbai, Pune, Trivandrum and Cochin .
To my surprise, there was an Air India flight from Dubai to Mumbai for just 7K (incl of food and 30 KG baggage). I quickly checked a Mumbai to Chennai flight and it costed me only 2K. So totally I was able to successfully book a Dubai to Chennai ticket for just 9K and saved 12000. Yes I have to change flights in Mumbai ( from International terminal to Domestic terminal). Plus there will be a short delay of 2 hours between flights but it’s something I’m perfectly willing to adjust given my savings.
How to get cheap flight tickets from Chennai to Maldives?
I was searching for a flight from Chennai to Maldives ( for another friend). Either some early morning flights were not available or it was too costly at nearly 15K. I again looked up cities in Kerala that has a large no of flights to Maldives. Luckily I was able to find a flight for just 8K in Spicejet which perfectly suited my timing. I was able to get a train ticket to Cochin for just 500 Rs(A simple overnight journey) and I could save 7500 per person
Hope the above method was useful. So next time don’t trust the price displayed in online sites like Makemytrip, Cleartrip blindly. Follow the below rules and you’d find yourself super lucky to get cheap international flight tickets
How to check for Cheap International Flight Tickets?
Step 1: Just open up a map and see the cities that also has frequent flights to your destination.
Step 2 : Compare the price of ticket to that city vs your city(Chennai-Maldives vs Cochin-Maldives vs Bangalore-Maldives vs Trivandrum-Maldives). If the fare difference is less than 2K, you can book a direct flight from your city as usual.
Step 3: If fare difference is super high, check intercity fares ( in example 2 : Chennai to Cochin) and if less book Cochin to Maldives and book a train/cheap flight to Cochin from Chennai
Step 4 : Usually the default airline sites offer the best low cost deal with lesser amount of service charges and more flexibility in add-ons. Eg : I have always found www.airasia.com, www.jetairways.com and Spicejet website offering low-cost add ons compared to MakemyTrip, ClearTrip etc. But in other scenarios, these travel aggregators give you wallet cashbacks and discount codes that could give you some nice discounts apart from flight-hotel combo discounts.
Top cities to get cheap International Flight Tickets
- Delhi to Bangkok ( via Kolkatta )
- Southern cities in India to Thailand (via Chennai and Bangalore as AirAsia flies for as low as 4K), India to Singapore(via Chennai and Bangalore as AirAsia and Tiger Airways costs just 6K one way)
- India to Malaysia via Trichy and Chennai
The above method is for passengers who want to save some serious money while booking flights and are willing to adjust the extra 2-3 hours for the transit between flights and changeover between domestic terminal to International terminal in some cases
Key Advantages in Multi City Itinerary
- The main advantage is that you get to save lots of money (assuming a min savings of 5K, and a four member family can save easily 20K one-way, so that’s 40K for a return flight savings)
- Double Loyalty points (one in each airline) that you fly. So you can get JetMiles /other loyalty points for each leg of the journey
- A multi city vacation : If you are travelling to a destination, you can stopover in a city,tour it and take the connecting flight next day and still save money(than a direct flight)
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