Episode #48: How To Find Cheap Flights and Save Thousands on Family Travel With Thrifty Traveler
Traveling with a family can get expensive quickly, especially when you’re buying seven plane tickets like we are.
Airfare alone can make an international trip feel out of reach. But some of the best trips our family has ever taken started with one simple thing: a flight deal alert.
One of my favorite travel tools is Thrifty Traveler Premium. I pay for the premium membership every year, and it has easily paid for itself many times over through the deals we’ve actually booked. Instead of spending hours searching airline websites, checking different dates, and constantly looking for points availability, Thrifty Traveler does the searching for me. When they find a great cash fare or points and miles deal from an airport I follow, I get an alert and can decide if it works for our family.
Why flight deals matter for families
Saving $200 on a plane ticket is great when you’re traveling alone, but saving $200 per ticket when you’re buying seven tickets means $1,400 back in your travel budget. That’s why finding great airfare can make such a huge difference for family travel.
Rather than always choosing a destination and then hoping we can find affordable airfare for exact dates, I like to let great flight deals help determine where and when we travel. Most alerts I receive don’t turn into trips, but every once in a while one pops up for a place we’ve wanted to visit at a price that makes me stop and think, “We could actually do this.”
Our $450 round-trip flights to London
One of my favorite examples was our family trip to London. Several years ago, I received a Thrifty Traveler alert for round-trip flights to London for around $450 per person. For our family of seven, that meant we could fly everyone to London for around $3,150 total.
If those same flights had been $800 per person, we would have spent $5,600 just getting there. That one airfare deal potentially saved us thousands of dollars. This is why I always tell families to focus on the big travel expenses first. Saving a few dollars on lunch is great, but finding an incredible airfare for an entire family can completely change the cost of a vacation.
Taiwan for only 25,000 Delta miles round trip
Another one of my favorite deals was our trip to Taiwan with our two oldest kids. We were able to book four round-trip tickets for only 25,000 Delta SkyMiles per person, or 100,000 Delta miles total for all four of us.
Those flights could easily have cost around $1,000 per person, which would have meant roughly $4,000 in airfare. Instead, we used 100,000 miles for all four round-trip tickets. There are times when you can spend close to 25,000 miles on a domestic flight, so getting all the way to Asia and back for that amount was an incredible redemption.
This is also why I think earning points is only half of the points and miles game. You need to know how to use those points well. Having 100,000 points doesn’t mean nearly as much if you’re spending twice as many points as you need to for a flight.
Using points to fly business class to the Maldives
Thrifty Traveler has also helped my husband and me find some incredible premium cabin opportunities for trips without the kids. One of the best was our trip to the Maldives, where we were able to book lie-flat business-class seats for around 85,000 points per person each way. We flew Singapore Airlines business class on the way there and Qatar Airways Qsuites on the way home.
These were extremely long flights, so being able to sleep in lie-flat seats made the journey part of the experience. Paying cash for comparable business-class tickets could have cost thousands of dollars per person. Using points allowed us to have an experience we probably would never pay cash for.
Business class and premium economy to Japan
We were able to do something similar on our trip to Tokyo. My husband and I flew United business class to Japan for around 90,000 points each, then flew United Premium Plus premium economy home for around 55,000 points each.
Premium economy wasn’t lie-flat business class, but we had more space, extra legroom, and seats with more recline than standard economy. On a long international flight, that extra comfort made a big difference.
Recent Thrifty Traveler deals I’ve seen
These aren’t just deals we found years ago. I continue to get alerts for destinations all over the world. Recently, I’ve seen round-trip flights to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands for under $398, New York City for under $299, and Auckland, New Zealand for under $766, including some peak-season availability.
One of the points deals that really caught my attention was American Airlines business class to Paris starting at only 42,000 miles each way. The alert showed that the same type of award can normally cost 150,000 miles or more. That is a huge difference and a perfect example of why I love getting award alerts.
If you have 150,000 points, you could spend almost all of them on one flight, or you could potentially find a deal that requires only 42,000. Finding those lower redemption rates is how you make your points stretch into more trips.
How Thrifty Traveler Premium works
Thrifty Traveler Premium is a flight deal alert service that searches for both cash airfare and points and miles deals. You select the airports you want to follow, and when they find a worthwhile deal, you receive an alert with the information you need to look into booking it.
One thing I love about the service is that you do not have to be a points and miles expert to use it. If you prefer paying cash, you can watch for cheap cash fares. If you collect airline miles or transferable credit card points, you can pay attention to award alerts. If flying business class is on your bucket list but you would never pay thousands of dollars for the ticket, premium cabin award alerts can help you find opportunities to use points instead.
How I use flight alerts with five kids
I’m obviously not booking a vacation every time an alert hits my inbox. With five kids, school schedules, work schedules, and everything else we have going on, that would be impossible. Instead, I treat the alerts like an opportunity board.
If a deal doesn’t work for us, I move on. But if I see an incredible price to a destination we’ve wanted to visit, I start looking at the bigger picture. Can we make the dates work? What would hotels cost? Do we have hotel points? Is there a school break nearby? Do we already have airline or credit card points that could help cover the trip?
When the pieces line up, that’s when a flight alert can turn into an actual family vacation.
Let the deal help choose the destination
One of the best things you can do if you want to travel more affordably is give yourself some flexibility. Instead of deciding that you absolutely have to go to Paris during one specific week and then searching for the cheapest airfare available, consider deciding that you’d like to visit Europe sometime next spring and watching for a great deal.
Maybe Paris is expensive, but London suddenly drops to $450 round trip. Maybe there’s an incredible award deal to Amsterdam or Madrid. You can build your trip around the airfare instead of trying to force airfare into a trip that has already been completely planned.
That flexibility becomes even more valuable when you’re purchasing tickets for an entire family.
You don’t have to use points and miles
I also want to emphasize that Thrifty Traveler isn’t only useful for people who collect points and miles. Our London trip is a great example because we paid cash for those tickets.
If a family of four finds $450 flights to Europe instead of paying $800 per person, that family just saved $1,400 on one trip. A single deal like that could more than make up for the cost of having a flight alert service.
If you are interested in points and miles, I have an entire podcast episode about how our family uses them, along with a free beginner’s guide you can download. Learning how to earn points is important, but learning when and how to redeem them can make just as big of a difference.
Be ready when a good deal appears
Great flight deals don’t always last long, so it helps to think through some of your travel possibilities before the perfect alert arrives. Have a general idea of where your family would love to go, which school breaks could work, what you’re comfortable spending on airfare, which airports you’re willing to fly from, and what points and miles you currently have available.
That doesn’t mean you need to book impulsively. It means that when an unusually good opportunity appears, you can quickly determine whether it makes sense for your family instead of spending days trying to figure everything out after the price has already disappeared.
Is Thrifty Traveler Premium worth it?
For our family, it absolutely has been. I pay for the membership annually, and the value we’ve received from it has far exceeded what I’ve paid. Between our London flights, our Taiwan redemption, and premium cabin trips to destinations like the Maldives and Japan, these alerts have helped us stretch our travel budget and our points much further.
The other thing it saves me is time. I’m a mom of five. I don’t have time to sit at my computer every day checking dozens of airlines, destinations, dates, and award calendars. I would much rather have someone else searching and send me an alert when there’s something worth seeing.
If you want to try Thrifty Traveler Premium, I have a special link that will save you $20 off your first year. I’ll include it below so you can check it out and start watching for deals from your preferred airports.
Some of our favorite family trips have started with an email alert that made me stop and think, “Wait, we could actually go there.” If traveling more with your family is something you want to do, being flexible and learning how to recognize a great airfare deal can make destinations that once seemed too expensive much more attainable.
Affiliate disclosure: This post contains an affiliate link for Thrifty Traveler. If you sign up through my link, I may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. I personally pay for and use Thrifty Traveler Premium, and all opinions and experiences shared here are my own.
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