3 Ways To Fly Cheap

I’m not gonna lie—I’m an airplane kind of guy. My dad works for a major commercial airline, and my entire full-time engineering career has been in the aerospace industry. I love the smell of jet fuel in the morning, and I have no issues with long flights and hanging out in airports for hours.

I know air travel makes us think of high costs for traveling. It’s often the fastest way to travel long distances, and doing so comes at a price. Flying for travel has always been a part of my life like my arms and my legs. And despite my frequent travels, flying doesn’t personally cost me those arms and legs.

Air travel doesn’t have to cost you your appendages either.

Pilgrimages often require flying in order to see and visit the really cool sites. But this is Pilgrim for Less. You don’t need to spend lots of money on air travel to go on pilgrimages.

Over the past several years, I’ve utilized different tickets for flights. Let me share with you three ways that you can fly cheap:

1. Paid ticket
2. Award ticket
3. Nonrevenue/Buddy Pass

Not too complicated, eh? Allow me to further explain each one.

1. Paid Ticket

Paying for an airline ticket is the most ordinary means of getting your literal arms and legs onto a plane. For most people, this involves booking directly with an airline or booking through a travel agency, whether brick-and-mortar or online. You pay actual cash monies for a guaranteed seat on a flight.

For most of my life, I did not utilize paid airline tickets (because my dad works for an airline (see last method)). It wasn’t until I started traveling to Japan frequently for work starting in 2015 that I really started using paid tickets to fly places. Therefore, I’m not as well versed in deal-finding for paid tickets.

However, I do utilize Google Flights as a starting point for researching cheaper flights. What makes it great is that it’s a search engine for airfare, and it provides a user-friendly interface where you can easily adjust your flight details in order to see how those changes affect the price. Google Flights will also allow you to compare results between booking direct with the airlines and some of the online travel agencies. One time I was able to find round-trip tickets on American Airlines from Texas to San Diego for $180 using Google Flights (unfortunately…I was never able to get on that plane because I got sent to Japan!).

Ways to Reduce Ticket Price

Within paid airline tickets, here are some ways or considerations to reduce the price of your ticket:

• Fly during non-peak season (ie. Rome in the winter and spring)
• Similarly, fly during the week and not during the weekend
• For round trip tickets, have longer trips between incoming and outgoing flights (7 day trip vs. 3 day trip)
• Add layovers or stops
• Utilize low cost carriers
• Purchase lower fare codes (like basic economy, or non-refundable fares)

Paying for an airline ticket is going to cost the most money out-of-pocket.

2. Award Ticket

Most major airlines have a loyalty program that you can sign up for. When you do, you can earn miles for that airline. Redeeming those miles to fly results in an award ticket. Typically, you can only redeem award tickets via the airline itself or through an airline partner. For example, I have American Airlines AAdvantage miles, and I can only redeem those on American Airlines or on one of American’s partners like Japan Airlines and Cathay Pacific. Signing up for a loyalty program is pretty easy usually just requiring your name and basic contact information.

Because of frequent business trips to Japan for work, I’ve earned many miles. I’ve been able to redeem those miles for trips like flying my parents, my brother, and myself to Italy for a week in 2017 or attending Mother Teresa’s canonization in 2016. Using miles.

An airline’s website should allow you to search award tickets much in the same way you would search for flights normally. I often see a checkbox that you can check in order to tell the flight search bar that you’re looking for award tickets.

Award ticket costs usually depend on the airline and where you’re traveling to. One thing I didn’t know when I first started dabbling in award tickets is that redeeming such awards actually carries two costs: miles and taxes/fees. However, the taxes and fees you pay out-of-pocket are, generally, way cheaper than buying a paid ticket outright. For example, you can fly Singapore Airlines new first class suites for a one-way ticket costing ~$4500 (USD) from Singapore to Sydney, Australia. The award ticket for the same seat is 150,000 KrisFlyer miles and ~$70 USD for taxes and fees. When I went to Rome for Mother Teresa’s canonization, it only costed me 77,500 and $178.36 for a round-trip economy class seat from Texas to Rome on American Airlines when such a seat normally costs $1200+.

Ways to Earn Miles Easily

You can earn miles pretty easily using the following ways:

• Fly frequently
• Fly frequently with elite airline status (because bonus miles earned are usually given for passengers with status)
• Use an airline’s shopping portal to earn miles from shopping online
• Use an airline’s cobranded credit card
• Be on the mailing list for an airline’s award program for other miles-earning opportunities

3. Nonrevenue/Buddy Pass

Airlines usually give their employees benefits to fly for free. They are able to do this by flying nonrevenue standby whereby they can fly on flights with space-available seats or seats that are unsold. My dad works for an airline so when I was growing up, my family frequently used his benefit to visit family in different states. Even now, I’m still able utilize his benefits to save costs on flying.

For employees of airlines and immediate family members, standby tickets are free. Sometimes they can extend this benefit to others, sometimes called a “buddy pass”, but with a small(er) out-of-pocket cost that are usually just taxes and fees. On trips to the Philippines this year, my parents used my dad’s benefit to travel to Japan for free in order to connect to Manila. Because I’m over the age threshold for a dependent, I have to use my dad’s buddy passes, but using them I can travel to Japan round trip for ~$500, which normally costs $2300+ for a paid economy class ticket.

I have a friend that also has a father who works for the same airline, and we’ve been able to pull off day trips from Texas to other places in the US of A. One weekend, we went to Washington, DC for a day to visit a seminarian friend of ours, came home the same day, and the first thing next morning we flew to San Diego to visit another good friend, stayed one night, and came back first thing the next morning. All in a weekend. We’ve also hit up day trips to San Antonio, Nashville, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. These day trips typically cost me <$200 round trip when they can easily be $300+.

Struggles Flying Nonrev

Despite the potential for saving lots of money, there are several struggles with flying using nonrevenue standby or buddy passes:

• You’re not guaranteed a seat and therefore can be bumped to standby on the next flight (and the next flight, and the next flight…until you’re having to sleep at the airport…)
• You usually board the aircraft last
• Your family member or friend with the benefit only has a limited amount of buddy passes
• People flying standby are processed by priority (and buddy pass travelers are often processed last)
• If you have elite status with the airline, those benefits will not apply

Unless you or your spouse works for an airline or you’re real buddies with some friends who do, then this method is going to be challenging to accomplish.

As I mentioned earlier, this is the method I grew up with, and its been my ordinary means of flying for forever. It’s only been with the past few years that I’ve been utilizing paid and award tickets.

Bottom Line

Flying is a fast way to get anywhere, but it does come at cost. Thankfully, there are multiple ways to fly cheap. For going on more pilgrimages for less, the key is to leverage lowering the cost of flying so that you can see more of the Church in the world.

I should also mention that packaged pilgrimages or pilgrimages done through a pilgrim office or travel agency are paid tickets but with a group discount. However, if done like this, you might not earn or use award miles. As an example of what I mean, if you flew from Chicago to Rome with a packaged pilgrimage, you’d be flying all those miles without earning award miles (9646 miles for round trip, to be exact!). That’s enough miles to almost cover a one-way flight domestically!

Now that you know about these three different ways, stay tuned, and we can further explore strategies on using these methods to go on more pilgrimages. For less. And fly cheap.

Question for you–have you ever redeemed award miles to fly somewhere? If so, where did you go?

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Screenshot of redeem miles from aa.com.