How to find cheap flights to anywhere during COVID
Finding the best flight to hop in has always been a tedious and time-consuming job. Dozens of tabs open in your browser, evenings spent on price, and date comparison.
Now it’s even more complicated when we have COVID travel restrictions upon us, and each country has its own ever-changing list of places that are still open for entry.
Where to get all this info? Is there any centralized place we could trust?
In this article, I’m going to share my favorite set of tools for flight research.
Step 1: Check your COVID travel restrictions
Use Covid Controls for a quick one-page overview where it still safe to travel from your country. You could even find more in-depth data on COVID like outbreak trends, 7 days dynamics, and much more.
Pick your country of origin, check the list of available destinations for entry, click on a country to learn more about specific restrictions, like PCR test or two weeks quarantine.
While this tool promise to update the restrictions daily, a good idea would be to double-check the travel restrictions on official sources like country portals before traveling; things are changing rapidly.
Step 2: Check visa requirements
Once you identified the target country for your travel, you may want to check for entry requirements (visa-free, e-visa, or visa on arrival).
I prefer Visa List for its simplicity. Same procedure here. Check your country of origin, find the list of the countries color-coded by visa type. Map view is super-convenient.
Step 3: Find the best flight price
There are dozens of traditional flight meta-searches. Here you can find fresh alternative tools for flight price research and comparison. They would take less of your time and clicks with a better user experience and no ads.
If you’re visual and prefer the map representation over lists, use Escape to see all the flights departing from your destination visualized on the map all at once. You could apply multiple filters combining direct flights only with price, visa, or even weather requirements.
For quick flight price comparison across multiple destinations, use TravelRank. Select your departing airport, leave the date range empty so it could suggest you the best price a year ahead, apply the country and activity filters (Sights, Nightlife, Kids-friendly, and so on).
Hopper is a very unique tool on its own. It predicts if the current price is the cheapest for the flight which you’re interested in (based on price history fluctuations over the past decade for this given route). It’s a mobile-only product. It tells you (via the push notifications) whether it’s the right time to buy or should you wait a bit more to save up to 40%.
Step 4: Find the best dates
Google Flights is still one of the best options for date research if you want more control and manual choice. Select the target destination and switch to date grid and price graph mode (just be prepared for its nerdy-looking UI).
If you prefer more relaxed price research, you trust in modern technologies and automation; Hopper is a better choice in my opinion than Google price charts.
TravelRank, on the other hand, could give you the single best price per destination in the range of 365 days from now. This is especially handy if you do the initial research, comparing the destination by the pricing, and has no fixed date yet.
Step 5: Book it
Congrats! You found a destination with the best flight date and price.
In most cases, you will be redirected to the airline web-store for a direct purchase like it's done on Google Flights, Travelrank, or Escape.
Travelrank partnered with kiwi. Kiwi has pioneered an interesting concept of virtual interlining, which combines flight segments from more than 250 low-cost carriers (even if they didn’t work with each other), creating a more seamless experience in case if you have multiple connections.
Do you consider traveling in 2021?
What your favorite tools of choice for flight research and planning?
Drop some comments below!
Alex Shevchuk, Founder of TravelRank.
