Ask HN: How do you find airline tickets?

I usually start off on Google Flights but try to check out CheapTickets.com or Priceline.com, which sometimes have "blind deals" meaning they sell you a ticket without a time for a discounted rate. You know the date you are leaving, but you don't know the time until you purchase the ticket. Oftentimes, these are early morning flights, which I prefer since they are less likely to be packed and you often can get rows to yourself.

Some advice on getting cheaper tickets:

- Make sure you are months out although sometimes you can get deals within a month of the flight

- Purchase your plane ticket on a Tuesday

- Fridays, Saturdays, and Mondays are probably going to be your most expensive days

- Be willing to adjust your flight by a few days -- Google Flights is especially helpful with showing you quickly the difference in prices and it can be a few hundred bucks saved just by leaving the next day or a day earlier

- Always check your prices in Incognito mode first and when you are ready to make an actual purchase, then you can go into Regular mode

- Almost always, early morning flights are cheaper

- Direct flights are almost always more expensive

- Pack light, take little, save the most

- Look for the airlines with special deals -- Spirit airlines is headquartered in Vegas, so they are always trying to get people to come to Vegas for a vacation -- likely sponsored by Vegas, and you can get these tickets for less than $100 roundtrip. Southwest and Frontier also have amazing deals. The issue with these flights, however, is that they will fly you into their HQ and you may have a long layover, but it could be worth it

- Google Flights is often good at letting you know if its a good deal as they keep a price watch on all flights

Sidenote: if I want to build my little script to find cheap flights on a set of predefined routes... where do I start? It looks like there aren't much open APIs to query in this space

IDK how Google flight is a serious option when any complex query (2 layovers on obscure route) always ends up with "oops the price you've seen before isn't available anymore" or you need to "Call agent" to get realistic price.

For domestic USA I get a companion pass with SW for two years right at the beginning of the year. I rinse and repeat and only book with SW. Credit card offers are the best way to do this and there’s plenty of sites talking about it.

Google Flights and when I feel like the price can be better I set alerts which will notify me on the daily about price changes and buy when the price is right.