Cheapest International Air Tickets that I ever Booked

Who doesn’t love travelling, especially international trips. But biggest chunk of any trip is finding cheapest international air tickets and sometimes the cost of it may be more than half of the total cost. Getting cheapest air tickets is like finding the holy grail.

There are different ways to find cheaper ones, it may be booking on a specific day of week or flying on certain day, reserving months before, planning in off-peak season, early morning flights, going to nearest airport, choosing multi-trip or different routes, using flight search engines.

There is no any magic wand for finding cheap airline flight tickets and this article is not about it.

I will share some of the hacks and strategy which I have followed to book some of the cheapest international air tickets.

See how I traveled from India to Europe & Russia for just Rs 30,000

Before I am listing down the cheap international air tickets that I have ever booked, we need to understand – What price can be called as cheapest.

It is totally subjective, depends on many factors that airline consider in their airline ticketing system.

They use sophisticated algorithm for dynamic pricing keeping different parameters like number of seats booked, competitors pricing, baggage, weather, routes, places, premium services, add-ons and many more things than what we could imagine…

2018 Global Flight Price Ranking

To cut short this, we directly jump to Rome2rio website, a travel planning company which recently released report called “2018 Global Flight Price Ranking: What’s the world’s cheapest airline?”, their data scientist revealed snapshot of global pricing (in US$ per km) across international and domestic airlines. The cheapest airline in the world (only international) is Air Asia X, just 0.07 USD (~ Rs 5) average price per kilometre followed by Air India Express (0.08), Indonesia AirAsia (0.08), Primera Air (0.09) and IndiGo Airlines (0.10).

How they arrived at these figures, as per Rome2rio website – they analysed economy-class airfares over a period of two month, totalling approx. 1.5 million price points.

Don’t worry if it’s too technical for you. Finally, they arrived cheapest cost per kilometres for the airline.

I assume they might have been calculated realistic in terms of price per kilometre, this could be backed up with last year report by DGCA (Directorate General of Civil Aviation) that shows the cost of long-distance air travel in the country is Rs 5 per kilometre which is less than auto-rickshaw (tuk-tuk) fares.

This means as simple as this for us: Distance between origin and destination places divided by cost of the ticket. The lesser the quotient, the cheaper the price.

Here are awesomely cheapest international air tickets (in Indian Rupees) I booked, some of them are as less than as Re 1 which far from world’s cheapest airlines.

No.	Origin	Destination	One-way/Return	Airlines	Price	Kms	Cost/Kms in INR
1	Dubai	Manila	One-way	Cebu Pacific	2731	6904	0.40
2	Hong Kong	Boston	Return	Air Canda	10941	25756	0.42
3	Manila	Dubai	One-way	Cebu Pacific	3989	6904	0.58
4	Paris	Stockholm	One-way	Ryan Air	1196	1868	0.64
5	Manila	Gaum	Return	Cebu Pacific	5225	5138	1.02
6	Barcelona	Paris	One-way	Ryan Air	1196	1035	1.16
7	Kiev	Istanbul	Return	Ukraine International	2466	2120	1.16
8	Manila	Shanghai	Return	Cebu Pacific	4475	3698	1.21
9	Bengaluru	Kuala Lumpur	Return	Air Asia	7054	5760	1.22
10	Dubai	Kiev	Return	Ukraine International	6976	4916	1.42
11	Moscow	Rome	One-way	Brussels Airline	3467	2400	1.44
12	Kuala Lumpur	Perth	Return	Air Asia	12121	8352	1.45
13	Rome	Barcelona	One-way	Ryan Air	1356	859	1.58
14	Delhi	Moscow	Return	Air Manas	14590	8620	1.69