Lately, we’ve received some inquiries about finding the least-expensive airfare to and from California to Maine, and I thought I’d pass along the tool that we use to unearth this info.
It used to be, that you could do a search by an open date range, say, 30 days for all of October (our favorite month), and see which days contained the best rates. This was very handy if you had flexible travel dates in order to find the cheapest airfare. However, a few years ago this capability appears to have been throttled-down on some search and aggregator sites, and you were then limited to selecting specific dates, one… by… one; and slog through all the individual dates to (hopefully) hit a good airfare. However, this could be about as efficient as throwing a dart at an unmarked board, hoping to pinpoint your cheap airfare price-point.
As a workaround, and to still have the ability to shop the field of airlines, all at once, try visiting Matrix Airfare Search.
This browser-based, flight schedule aggregator re-instates the ability to do searches based on flexible flight dates. You input your departure/destination locations and other choices, then select “See calendar of lowest fares”.
A feature that can be very handy is that, after receiving your calendar of flights, you can easily toggle “Red Eye”, or overnight flights on and off using a checkbox at the top-right of the calendar.
Another option would be to use Google Flights. It has similar capabilities, except that we could not find the handy Red Eye toggle.
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