Traveling is great, but booking a flight? That can be financially overwhelming. Even with discount airlines and holiday deals, it’s tough to find the best price.

In this post, I’m going to show you how easy it is to use a VPN to search for deals of hundreds of dollars or more on airline tickets.

How Travel Companies Know Your Location

Travel companies and airline websites are known to “price discriminate” – i.e., offer different prices on the same exact flights to those based in different locations. Ahead, I’ll show you how you can use this to your advantage.

These are the ways these websites can determine your location:

An Internet Protocol (IP) address is like your ID number on the Internet – but one that tells websites where you’re located. Any website you connect to is able to see your personal IP address.

Cookies personalize your browsing experience by tracking and storing information on some of your activities. Websites can monitor your behavior on the Internet by putting cookies on your device.

Websites can also use the GPS features on your device to see where you’re located, and then use that to determine which pricing to offer you.

If you’re browsing through Wi-Fi, websites can track your location if you give them permission.

With HTML5 geo-location coding, websites can track your location even on your personal computer.

Travel companies can also use your chosen payment currency to infer your location and make judgments on your socioeconomic status.

All of the above are why you can end up paying more than someone in a different part of the world using a different currency – even if you’re looking at the exact same date, airline and flight.

You may even notice that the more you search, the higher the prices go. That’s because these websites often track your searches using the tools above. If they see you shopping for the same flight over and over, they can tell you have a willingness to pay – and jack up the price accordingly.

How To Find Cheaper Flights

So how can you potentially save money on flight tickets without getting penalized for your location? Simple – just use a VPN to search for tickets both anonymously and as though you were located in another country.

Here are the steps I took to score deals on flights:

Search for flight deals on a website like KAYAK.com or Expedia.com without using a VPN. Mark down which flights you’d like to take. Fire up your VPN and connect to a server in a different country. Open up an incognito window in a separate browser. Search for flights just like you did in Step 1. Compare the prices. Repeat Steps 3 to 6 to find the best prices.

Video: How to Save Money on Flights With a VPN

Tricks to Finding Good Deals on Flights

You might be wondering: What are some tactics to finding good deals on plane tickets?

1. Change your IP address to a low-income country

You’re more likely to find deals if you search for the flights you want with a VPN server in a poorer country – e.g., India or Romania. These sites will generally offer better deals because they expect people in those countries will be unwilling to pay as much as someone in the United States, for example.

2. Change your IP address to your destination country

I’ve also found it helpful to change my VPN server so it’s based in the place I’m looking to travel to. Sometimes, airlines offer special local deals you can’t get unless you have a local IP address.

3. Change your IP address to the airline’s home country

The same goes if when I switch my IP so it’s based in the airline’s home country. For instance, if I’m traveling with a Brazilian airline, I switch to a Brazilian IP address – and chances are good that prices may be lower.

Remember that prices always fluctuate depending on the country you’re searching from. FareCompare suggests that the best time to get the lowest prices on airfare in the U.S. is Tuesday at 3 p.m. ET.

4. Change your IP address to reset price hikes

As explained above, when travel websites see that you’re repeatedly searching for the same flights from the same IP address, they’ll hike up the prices. To avoid this, connect to one of SaferVPN’s global servers – even within your own country. Then, browse back onto your favorite flight website, and you are likely to see the prices drop back to where they started.

5. Clear your cookies

Utilizing your browser’s private mode to prevent storing cookies, as well as clearing or disabling your cookies, will help prevent tracking from travel websites. That being said, without using a VPN, you can still be traced through your IP address.

6. Use international versions of websites

Prices may differ by the origin of the website you’re using. Try browsing through alternative versions of the site you’re looking at, such as the British (.co.uk), French (.fr) or Canadian (.ca) localizations. Of course, without using a VPN, the travel site still may not reduce the price – and it may simply redirect you to your local website.

Using SaferVPN to Save Money on Flights

Here are a few examples I came across when searching for flights that demonstrate the different deals a site like KAYAK.com can display depending on where it thinks I’m searching from.

First, I connected to SaferVPN’s server in the United States. Next, I searched on KAYAK.com for flights from New York to New Delhi for a date I wanted to travel: February 20, 2019. Then, I jotted down the prices for some flights that worked with my schedule.

Then, I simply changed my virtual identity by connecting to SaferVPN’s server in India and did the exact same search. Lo and behold, many of the flights I jotted down now had completely different prices listed.

For example, when using a US IP address, I found a flight with KLM– one of my favorite airlines – connecting in Amsterdam that cost $3694. But when searching with an India-based IP address, that same exact flight cost the equivalent of $967!

Of course, this is an extreme example. Honestly, most price differentials aren’t this dramatic.

I also found a British Airways flight that stopped in London on the way to New Delhi, priced at $986 for Americans. But for Indian customers, that flight only cost $846!

Sometimes, certain flights aren’t even available for those in particular countries. For example, I had trouble finding flights from New York to New Delhi with Virgin Atlantic – only one deal came up. But when I clicked the deal to find out more information, the link took me to Virgin Atlantic’s website, which had the error message below.

But when I put in the same exact information with an India-based IP address, I found a whole bunch of deals!

I don’t guarantee you’ll get the same results I did, but the chances are pretty good that searching for a flight using this method will offer you the opportunity to choose from lower-priced flights. I recommend checking a few different times and trying with different IP addresses to see the differences in prices that may be available.

Is it Okay to Use a VPN When Booking Flights?

I contacted United’s customer service representative to learn their stance on taking advantage of their price discrepancies abroad to book cheaper flights. The lovely customer service representative acknowledged that they do post different prices in different countries and that travel agent sites (e.g., Expedia, KAYAK) do the same thing. Moreover, they work with different licensed travel agents in different countries, which is a big reason for the price differences.

I asked specifically about VPNs, and she said there’s nothing in their contract of carriage against using one. I even told her that I was looking at the Brazilian United site through a VPN while I was chatting with her, and she said I could book that flight with no worries.

United also said that it is totally legal to use a VPN to book flights from another geographic location.

I also emailed KAYAK.com about it, and here’s our correspondence:

As you can see, neither the airline nor KAYAK has a problem with using a VPN to purchase tickets at a cheaper price.

Start Packing Your Bags!

In today’s e-commerce savvy world, many e-tailers use some kind of pricing segmentation to take advantage of higher purchasing power. That’s their marketing strategy, and it works for them.

With a VPN, it’s easy to hop between the different price segments and make it work for you.

If you’re looking to try this out, get a free trial of SaferVPN or a subscription with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Have any feedback, suggestions or feature requests? Feel free to contact SaferVPN and connect via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram!