After traveling internationally for over 10 years now, I wanted to share with you all my favorite resources and strategies for finding the best prices on flights. And, if you make it to the end of the article, you’ll find the best deals I’ve scored on international flights.

So, first things first, if you are a child, student, youth, or senior, make sure you are taking advantage of the discounts available to you. When looking at different aggregators, make sure to tick the box which applies to you, these discounts can be as much as 50% off the original fare, or you might get access to otherwise unadvertised fares specifically available to folks in your age group. You can always sign up with your airline of choice to get these discounts, but if you’re looking for an aggregator service to combine all of the discounts across airlines, I would recommend Student Universe or AARP.

For those who are more on the spontaneous side, or who have a destination in mind but may be a little more flexible on the timing of their journey, I would recommend signing up for a deals mailing list. These services usually have staffs who are regularly scouring the internet to find the best deals from your airport. I have booked so many of my transatlantic flights on a whim after getting a notice of a particularly good discount to a destination I wanted to check out. I’m a big Scott’s Cheap Flights fan, but there are tons of options out there that offer a similar service.

But let’s say you aren’t in a special age class and you don’t have as much flexibility on the timing or location of your flights, you still want to make sure you get the best deal. If you have a little lead time on your flight (like more than 6 months), I would recommend using a service that will alert you when prices are best for your selected flight. I use Hopper and Skyscanner for this but have found Google Flights alerts have also come in handy for cross-checking prices.

If you are ready to buy a flight now, I would recommend checking out an aggregator that will pull flights from several different airlines as well as from different discount providers. Google Flights and Expedia do this pretty well, but ever since an ex living in Sweden turned me on to Momondo, I haven’t looked back. What puts them over the top for me is the flexibility of their search engine – you can pick several different destinations at once, add flexible dates, and they scrape from a ton of sites to get you the lowest possible price.

And to put this all in perspective, I want to share the least expensive flights I’ve been able to book using these services:

• Student Universe helped me get to London and back in 2011 for my study abroad program. I was able to snag a $625 round trip flight on Iceland Air at a time when the average cost of a round trip flight from JFK to London was between $950 and $1400 (according to the CNN Money Article from the time)
• Then, in 2019, my husband and I decided we wanted to go to Italy for a joint birthday holiday in October. I had budgeted $850 for each of us for a round trip ticket (which seemed ambitious at the time), but we ended up snagging our tickets at $528 per person!
• But by far, the best fare I’ve been able to get since we started traveling is actually an upcoming trip. My in-laws let us know they wanted to do a beach week in early September with the whole family this year, so I’ve been keeping an eye on fares. But by some miracle, when I was searching through fares, I found round trip tickets from Brussels to Baltimore for €255 (~$280) per person!