How to Get the Cheapest Flights Online – The Ultimate 2025 Guide

You can save money by booking flights a few months in advance, but it doesn’t always work. This is because airlines and travel sites use algorithms and other technologies to show you higher fares to maximize profits regardless of when you pay for your trip.

There are several ways to avoid overpaying for tickets, but the most reliable and easiest method is to use a VPN. A VPN changes your IP address so you can get a fair deal and keeps your browsing activities private from trackers on booking sites.

I tested 55 VPNs, and ExpressVPN’s huge network in over 105 countries make it the best to save on flights since it’s so easy to find great deals. Plus, you can subscribe to ExpressVPN confidently and if you’re not satisfied, get a quick refund within 30* days. Editor’s Note: Transparency is one of our core values at WatchEverywhere, so you should know we are in the same ownership group as ExpressVPN. However, this does not affect our review process, as we adhere to a strict testing methodology.

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Quick Guide: How to Get the Cheapest Flights Online

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1. Change Your Local Flight Deals With a VPN

Airlines and travel companies provide deals and pricing based on your geographical location. In many cases, booking from a location with a different income level than your home country can result in more favorable offers. The good news is that you don’t have to physically be present in another country to take advantage of these discounted flights.

With a VPN, it’s possible to change locations virtually by connecting to a server in another country. To the airlines, it’ll seem like the booking comes from that region.

VPN encryption also makes it so hackers and other third parties can’t see your real IP address or what you’re doing online. This includes airlines and travel companies, which use algorithms to track you on the web and change their prices based on your location and web history.

A VPN server is extremely easy to use. All you need to do is download a reliable VPN like ExpressVPN. Once logged in, simply select a country that you’d like to connect to and begin searching for your favorite destinations. If you’re not satisfied with the deals, it’s easy to get a full refund within the 30*-day money-back guarantee period.

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2. Delete Cookies and Browse in Incognito Mode

Airlines and travel websites install cookies on your device to remember which flights and destinations you look at and track your location. Armed with this information, airlines and travel agencies can increase prices every time you check and even manipulate them based on your internet activities. The easiest way to stop these sites from following your searches is to delete your cookies, browsing history, and cache.

I also highly recommend using incognito or private mode when searching for cheap flights on any of these browsers. These modes prevent your data from being collected via cookies, browsing history, and other methods. However, you might still have some cookies saved in your browser — to find the best deals, always delete cookies and cached data before searching for cheap flights.

3. Compare Travel Fares on Flight Comparison Sites

I’ve bookmarked Kayak, Skyscanner, and Expedia as the 3 best services to find the cheapest tickets. These flight comparison sites cut down on manual search time by collecting results from dozens of airline sites for the best airfares.

Using a VPN with flight comparison sites like Skyscanner will help you find and book cheaper tickets in other regions where lower prices display in search.

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4. Be Flexible With Your Arrival and Departure Dates

To get the lowest prices, it helps if you’re open to booking dates when no one else wants to travel. Usually these are weekdays, low seasons, and months without any major holidays. This is because airlines want to fill up their planes throughout the year, so during quiet weeks they try to entice you with extremely low fares.

Remember also that peak and low travel periods are different in various parts of the world, influenced by local holidays and seasons. For example, when it’s winter in the US, it’s summer in Australia. This means you could be charged more for tickets to Melbourne even though it’s a low season in the US.

Most top flight comparison sites like Skyscanner, Kiwi, and Kayak show you how much tickets would cost on alternative dates near the ones you’ve picked.

5. Take Advantage of Airline Error Fares as Soon as They Appear

Airlines sometimes publish extremely cheap fares on their websites by mistake due to human error, technical bugs, or even currency conversion glitches. You can save significantly when you catch these mistakes and book your tickets before the airline fixes them.

You used to monitor airline sites obsessively to find these mistakes, but now there are websites, social media groups, and forums dedicated to finding and publishing error fares. Many of them are free to use, though some charge subscription fees.

6. Book Flights in Advance (But Not Too Far in Advance)

Airlines often discount their tickets for only a certain period. That’s why booking your seat extremely far in advance can cost as much as doing it last minute. You can use these as guidelines when arranging your next flight:

• Domestic flights — Book your trip 3 weeks to 3 months before your planned departure
• International flights — Buy at least 3 to 6 months in advance for flights abroad
• Holiday seasons — Tickets will be harder to find and more expensive around holidays, so book at least 4 to 8 months ahead
• Off-peak season — Get your tickets 2 to 3 weeks before departure, as airlines offer low fares to fill up their planes

These don’t guarantee the best rate and a good deal can become available anytime. For example, my last-minute search for long-distance flights to Amsterdam revealed a few low-fare tickets in the next 2 weeks even though it’s a popular travel time.

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7. Skip Unnecessary Flights With Hidden City Ticketing

Hidden city ticketing means you get off at your layover city instead of the final point of the journey. Longer flights with layovers seem like they should be more expensive, but sometimes they end up being cheaper than booking a direct flight to your destination. That’s because the fare depends more on current demand and popularity of each route than the distance you’ll fly.

It can be a nightmare to manually search for these types of flights but with Skiplagged, you don’t have to. Just visit the website and enter your destination and dates. Skiplagged will list all available flights, including those that have your final destination as a layover.

8. Book Tickets Directly With Budget Carriers

You can get significantly cheaper flights with budget airlines, and most regions have a few different options to choose from. Here are a few around the world:

Budget airlines are affordable because they save money on extra luxuries like seat selection, onboard meals, extra legroom, complimentary blankets, or sometimes even checked baggage. But they often have better deals, steeper seasonal price drops, and huge sales. You can sign up for a budget airline’s email newsletter to get automated alerts on discounts.

Budget airlines’ promotions are usually tough to beat, though it’s still worth checking out flight comparison sites just to be sure.

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9. Search For Individual Seats, Not Family Tickets

Although each seat on a plane varies in cost, airlines don’t add them up separately for group bookings. The carrier’s AI calculates your price by multiplying the total number of tickets you book with the most expensive seat in the group rather than pricing each individually.

To avoid this, book each member of your group one by one and choose the seats later so that you get the lowest price for each ticket. As a side note, this trick doesn’t work if you’re booking for children or people with special accommodations. Since they need on-board assistance or have other requirements, you’ll have to buy tickets simultaneously to prove they’re not traveling alone.

The other downside is that booking tickets separately for each leg of a long-haul flight can be risky if one of them is delayed. Airlines usually aren’t responsible for expenses this can cause, like having to reschedule your flights or book an overnight hotel stay.

10. Use Points and Rewards for Cheaper Flights

This is probably the easiest way to save money on flights. You can use rewards programs to earn points every time you fly and use them to travel cheaply or even for free. Almost every premium and budget airline has a reward program. With some airlines like Delta SkyMiles, Southwest Rapid Rewards, and JetBlue TrueBlue, your points don’t expire.

Additionally, credit cards like Chase Sapphire Preferred let you earn 5 points per dollar you spend on flights via Chase Travel and 2 points per dollar when you book elsewhere. If you’re a new customer, you can get 60,000 bonus points by spending $4,000 on the card in the first 3 months. As one of the best travel points programs, you could earn enough points in 3 months to finance an international round-trip flight.

Other cards that offer similar rewards include Capital One Venture X Rewards, Chase Sapphire Reserve, and Delta SkyMiles Reserve.

11. Get a Multi-Day Layover

Multi-day layovers are fantastic for seeing several cities or countries in a single trip and could save you hundreds on roundtrip flights. All you need is to be flexible with dates and book layovers that give you enough time in each location.

Many sites like Skyscanner and Kiwi have options to add multiple cities and flights. I decided to combine trips to several cities in the same region on Skyscanner and found that it’s possible to visit Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand for less than $1,500. The same itinerary cost significantly more when I tried to book them individually.

If you extend your trip to see a few extra cities, you can expect to pay a little more for hotels and food. But on the whole, you’ll still be spending considerably less on flights than if you were to book multiple round trips from your home country.

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How a VPN Can Help You Get Cheap Flights

Prices differ when you book from different geographic locations, but there’s no way to know which country will get the lowest fares on airline and comparison sites. A VPN allows you to connect to a server in another part of the world, displaying different pricing on booking sites.

They do it by looking at your IP address to determine your location. A VPN provides a new IP address so that booking and airline apps think the connection is from somewhere else. For example, browsing British Airways after connecting to a VPN server in Germany makes it look like you’re browsing flights from that country even though you’re at home. This displays different fares and deals.

VPNs also encrypts your connection so booking sites can’t use your search or browsing history to change pricing or track you online. You still have to research ahead of time which will be the cheapest country to buy tickets from, but a VPN makes it possible. My tests on 20 global ExpressVPN servers proved you can get cheaper flights with a VPN.

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Editor’s Note: Transparency is one of our core values at WatchEverywhere, so you should know we are in the same ownership group as ExpressVPN. However, this does not affect our review process, as we adhere to a strict testing methodology.

The Best VPNs for Finding the Cheapest Flight Deals in 2025

1. ExpressVPN — #1 VPN With a Massive Network Covering 105+ Countries to Find the Lowest Airfare

Outstanding

Outstanding

📍Servers	3,000+
📱Devices	8
💰Refund	30 days*
📝Keep logs	No
🔰Kill switch
📞Support 24/7	Yes
💲Best Deal
💰

See Deals

Key Features:

ExpressVPN is the best to locate the cheapest airfare with the most server coverage, with options to search for flights from any of 105+ countries. It’s easy to instantly change the virtual location to places like Sweden, Mexico, or Brunei to see where the lowest flights display. During tests, a return flight from Tokyo to Rome was cheaper when ExpressVPN was connected to a server in the Philippines versus one in the Netherlands.

I connected to almost 50 servers worldwide and my testing showed both short and long-distance ExpressVPN servers are lightning-fast. Even when connected to locations 8000 miles away, flight comparison sites didn’t take more than 5-8 seconds to deliver results.

On unstable public WiFi, I could lose my VPN connection and expose my real location. Luckily, ExpressVPN’s Network Lock stops all connections before any of my personal data is exposed. The VPN also has many other privacy and security features, like:

• Military-grade AES 256-bit encryption with Perfect Forward Secrecy to constantly change encryption keys, making your booking and payment information nearly impossible to hack
• IP and DNS leak protection to hide your location while you search for deals
• A no-log policy enforced by an audited TrustedServer network that ensures none of your search history or other private details are stored on a disk
• Located in privacy-friendly British Virgin Islands, that’s not part of any intelligence surveillance agency that can demand your internet activity from the VPN

You can search for the cheapest flights on almost any device whether on iPhone, an Android, or a Windows computer. I subscribed to ExpressVPN, downloaded the apps on mobile and desktop, and was connected to and browsing destinations in less than 8 minutes. Since ExpressVPN allows up to 8 simultaneous device connections, I tested it and found out that connecting on the maximum number of platforms didn’t affect my searches in any way.

The best ExpressVPN deal I found is the 2-year plan, which costs $$4.994.99 per month. If you’ve decided to plan your next trip with ExpressVPN, you can buy it confidently knowing it has a 30*-day money-back guarantee. To test the policy, I asked for a refund via 24/7 live chat after using the VPN for a few weeks. It was approved with no questions asked, and I got my money back in 4 days. Editor’s Note: Transparency is one of our core values at WatchEverywhere, so you should know we are in the same ownership group as ExpressVPN. However, this does not affect our review process, as we adhere to a strict testing methodology.

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2. CyberGhost — Super-Fast Connections to Take Advantage of Airline Flash Deals

Outstanding

Outstanding

📍Servers	11,676+
📱Devices	7
💰Refund	45 days
📝Keep logs	No
🔰Kill switch
📞Support 24/7	Yes
💲Best Deal
💰

See Deals

Key Features:

CyberGhost is another top VPN to book cheap flights as it has super-fast connections to avoid missing out on flash deals by airlines. I connected to a server in Asia and it allowed me to catch a limited 24-hour AirAsia sale. CyberGhost stayed steady at 60-68Mbps, allowing me to book with no lag or frozen screens — I purchased all the tickets I needed before they sold out in just 2 hours.

To keep me safe from hackers and ensure the airlines can’t track me, CyberGhost has a suite of powerful privacy and security features like:

• Military-grade AES 256-bit encryption to hide all your online activities from travel sites, spies, and hackers
• A kill switch that keeps your data anonymous even when the internet connection is unsteady
• Built-in tracker blocking and a proprietary private browser to stop travel sites from increasing prices based on your online activities
• An audited no-log policy to confirm none of your personal details, online activities, and bookings are stored anywhere

CyberGhost has locations in over 100 countries so you can search for cheap fares from places like Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and China. Using servers in Canada and then in China to book a flight from Singapore to Beijing, it was $117 cheaper when CyberGhost was connected to the China server.

The VPN has apps for all popular devices like iOS, Mac, Windows, and Android. If you’re like me and use different platforms to book flights, you get up to 7 simultaneous connections with CyberGhost. There are detailed step-by-step guides online, but I was able to install CyberGhost, connect to a server, and search booking sites in less than 5 minutes without needing help.

If you’re committed to using CyberGhost to plan your travels, the 2-year option is only $2.03 per month. Plus, it comes with a 45-day money-back guarantee if you’d like to get CyberGhost to plan your travels. I asked for a refund via the 24/7 live chat support, and someone approved it in 2 minutes. I got my money back in 5 days. Editor’s Note: Transparency is one of our core values at WatchEverywhere, so you should know we are in the same ownership group as CyberGhost VPN. However, this does not affect our review process, as we adhere to a strict testing methodology.

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3. Private Internet Access (PIA) — MACE Blocks Trackers That Increase Your Ticket Prices

Excellent

Excellent

📍Servers	35,000+
📱Devices	Unlimited
💰Refund	30 days
📝Keep logs	No
🔰Kill switch
📞Support 24/7	Yes
💲Best Deal
💰

See Deals

Key Features:

PIA has MACE, a tracker blocker to prevent travel sites from monitoring your activities online and increasing prices based on your search history. MACE isn’t on by default but after I activated it, my searches returned the lowest prices without having to clear cache and cookies repeatedly.

With over 35,000 PIA servers worldwide, you’ll never have to worry about congestion causing slow speeds since other PIA users can be spread out among the VPN’s huge selection of IP addresses. In the US alone, there are servers in all 50 states. During tests of numerous servers, PIA maintained 60Mbps download speeds. Flight searches displayed results almost instantly, making it easy to find a cheaper Chicago to New Delhi flight.

The VPN has native apps for all operating systems and browser extensions like Chrome and Firefox that are easy to install within a minute or two. At one point, I connected to PIA’s maximum of unlimited devices and had no disconnections or speed drops while finding cheap flights.

In terms of security and privacy, PIA has a few customization options:

• Choose AES military-grade 256-bit encryption for when you need maximum security, like when you use public WiFi to book. Or pick AES 128-bit encryption for maximum speed when chasing deals, so you can grab the last ticket before a flight sells out
• An advanced kill switch that’ll disable the internet until you’re securely connected to the VPN and ensure you never browse for flights without full security and privacy
• PIA accepts anonymous gift card payments from Starbucks, Walmart, and other major brands

If you’d like to use PIA for your next trip, I recommend the 2-year plan as it only costs $2.03 per month. It also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so there’s no risk in trying it. When I asked for my money back by sending an email with my order number and Paypal subscription ID, I was refunded in 2 weeks. Editor’s Note: Transparency is one of our core values at WatchEverywhere, so you should know we are in the same ownership group as Private Internet Access. However, this does not affect our review process, as we adhere to a strict testing methodology.

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Comparison Table: 2025’s Best VPNs for Getting Cheap Flights

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Editor’s Note: We value our relationship with our readers, and we strive to earn your trust through transparency and integrity. We are in the same ownership group as some of the industry-leading products reviewed on this site: ExpressVPN, Cyberghost, Private Internet Access, and Intego. However, this does not affect our review process, as we adhere to a strict testing methodology.

Don’t Overpay for Your Flight Tickets — Get the Best Deals Today!

The conventional method of booking flights months in advance doesn’t always work since airlines and booking sites have smart technologies to watch your activities and change fares frequently. But there are usually cheaper fares for the exact same route in another part of the world. The most reliable and easiest method to access these lower prices from anywhere is to use a VPN.

ExpressVPN is the best VPN for finding the cheapest fares as it has servers in over 105 countries to search all over the world for low-priced flights. You can also buy ExpressVPN completely risk-free as it’s backed by a 30*-day money-back guarantee — if you change your mind, you can easily get a refund.

Editor’s Note: Transparency is one of our core values at WatchEverywhere, so you should know we are in the same ownership group as ExpressVPN. However, this does not affect our review process, as we adhere to a strict testing methodology.

*Please note that ExpressVPN’s generous money-back guarantee applies to first-time customers only.

Summary: Best VPNs to Find Cheap Flights in 2025

Rank

Provider name

Our score

Price

Top Ranked Top Choice

1.

9.8

$4.99 / month Save 61%

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2.

9.6

$2.03 / month Save 84%

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3.

9.4

$2.03 / month Save 83%

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3.

9.4

$2.03 / month Save 83%

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Editor's Note: We value our relationship with our readers, and we strive to earn your trust through transparency and integrity. We are in the same ownership group as some of the industry-leading products reviewed on this site: ExpressVPN, Cyberghost, Private Internet Access, and Intego. However, this does not affect our review process, as we adhere to a strict testing methodology.