One of the best things about living in Seoul is that it’s a great launching pad to check out the surrounding countries in the region. I’ve learned it’s best to book directly with the airline though sometimes you can find some great deals on Korea sites if you know enough of the language to navigate the website or have a friend kind enough to do some translating for you.
Also, some of the best sites aggregate all of the airline fares and produce the lowest prices. One big reminder when using these sites is to always clear your memory cache and cookies because some websites remember the number of times you visit and up the price. Devious. But as long as you know what to do you should be all good.
Airlines
Aggregate Websites
Hipmunk is cool. At first I didn’t think it was so special. It asks for the same info as every other flight search site, but presto, once you hit that search button Hipmunk spits out results in a grid fashion that’s not only super easy to read but also weeds out bothersome flights with inflated prices or long layovers. Check it out! No more scrolling lists.
Getgoing is the new kid on the block and they’ve arrived in a big way. First, there’s the novelty of deciding what kind of vacation you want (romance, adventure, outdoors, big city) then you enter your dates and the engine will come up with multiple destinations showing how much you will save but without showing you what airlines. You then pick two destinations and Getgoing will pick one for you. That’s right you don’t really choose exactly where your going. Fun, right? They call it Pick Two, Get One. If you’re a flexible traveller this may be for you.
I like Skyscanner because you enter your departure point with no destination and it will spit out a listing of all the available destinations from least to most expensive. That’s great if you don’t really have any idea where you want to go or just want a last minute travel spot.
Boots n All makes multi-destination travelling a breeze. Simple type in your cities and your dates and it pulls up the flights for your trip. Hopping from city to city has never been easier.
Bing’s Travel site is pretty good because it will give you alerts and dates when the flight you want will be lower. If your travel dates are open this makes for a wonderful feature because you can plan accordingly.
Matrix skips all the fanfare and gets down to business. It’s similar to kayak, cheap tickets, and a few other sites except it has way less ads and wait times. Also if you know your routing codes you can pop them in for more specific results.
Another site that crawls the web for the latest and greatest ticket prices. Kayak also lets you compare to other sites that do the same to see if you’re really getting a better deal.
An Oceanic company now expanding service to the USA. The word is out that you can get cheaper tickets than directly from the airlines but some have had problems with changes being made without notification and some flights being dropped altogether, so do your homework.
Another site that aggregates different airlines to come up with the right fit for you. I’ve played around with one travel and so far it seems to be giving comparable prices to the other sites.
This site offers a few extras the others don’t. They have sections listing the baggage fees and policies for all airlines, their travel routes, an alert system to and from a desired destination, as well as a blog that keeps you up to date on deals going on. Not too shabby.
So there you have it! By no means is this list exhaustive so what’s your travel website for the cheapest, fastest, ticket in and out of Seoul? Leave your tips in the comments below to add to the list!
