L IV IN G T R AV EL

Use a Fake Location to Get Cheaper

Plane Tickets

Most people dont know there is a simple

trick to get a cheaper flight on an airlines
website
I cant explain airline pricing but I do
know some plane tickets can be cheaper
depending on where you buy them or,
even better, where you appear to buy
them from. This is all about leveraging
foreign currencies and points-of-sale to
your advantage.
For reasons I never quite understood,
every time I tried to book a domestic
flight in another country, the prices were always exorbitant. But, say, once I was in
Bangkok, that same flight that was once $300 would fall to $30 almost inexplicably. This
phenomenon is because a tickets point-of-salethe place where a retail transaction is
completedcan affect the price of any flight with an international component.
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Most people dont know there is a simple trick for changing this to get a cheaper flight
on an airlines website; its how I managed to pay $371 for a flight from New York to
Colombia instead of $500+. Though it can be used for normal international flights, it
often works best when youre buying domestic flights in another country. (Point in case:
A Chilean friend once told me Easter Island flights were much cheaper to buy in Santiago
instead of abroad.)

To demonstrate how this scheme works, we ran a one-way search from Cartagena to
Bogottwo cities in Colombiafor June 17 on Google ITA, Kayak and Skyscanner. To
keep things simple, Ill ignore a VivaColombia flight that Skyscanner found because
Google ITA and Kayak do not include smaller airlines in their searches. Instead, well be
comparing two large airlines that fly this route, LAN Airlines and Avianca.
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Unsurprisingly, Kayak takes a U.S.-centric approach. Going the path of least resistance, a
Kayak search shows that the cheapest flight on LAN is $116 and the cheapest flight on
Avianca is $137. If we run this exact search in Google ITA with New York City as the
point-of-sale, we see those exact numbers. Skyscanner returns similar results: the
cheapest flight on LAN is $114 and on Avianca it is $136.

Though Skyscanner actually has the best prices, lets not stop there. Instead of using an
American city as the point-of-sale, lets use Colombia as the point-of-sale, something that
can only be searched for in Google ITA. You actually dont have to tweak a thing because
the departure city is usually set as the default for this option that said, its possible to
change this to any place in the world you want. The main difference is well get the price
in Colombian pesos and thats *exactly* what we want.

In this new search, the cheapest flight on Avianca is 116,280 COP and the cheapest flight
on LAN is 173,820 COP. That of course means a lot of mumbo jumbo to most people, so
lets convert that over to U.S. dollars. The same Avianca flight now approximates to
$61.59 while the LAN flight is $91.96. In short, youd be saving $22.04 on the LAN flight
and $74.41 on the Avianca flight by simply paying in a different currency. The price
difference between the cheapest flight in both the U.S. and Colombia search is $54.41.
Thats how much youll end up saving just by comparing the flights in different
currencies.

Now the real problem is that weve got to find a place to buy this ticket in pesos since
Google ITA wont tell us where to go for that. I head directly to the Avianca website,
which brings us to the U.S. priceabout $137for the flight. Thats not what I want
though. I start again, but this time I click on the upper right-hand corner and select
Colombia as my country and English as my language. (Other airlines may not always
offer the ability to keep using the site in English. How good is your Spanish?) Its not
using the same thing as a VPN, but this mimics the idea that you are buying from a
different location other than the U.S.
I search again. Sometimes Im not always able to get the same exact fare I see in Google
ITA, but I almost always manage to get something cheaper than what Kayak calculated
for me. In this case, the cheapest flight available is 136,000 COP or $72.14, a bit more
than what I was told but still less than Kayaks price. To save the most money, make sure
you pay in a credit card that doesnt charge foreign transaction fees. In total, I manage to
get a flight about $43.86 cheaper than what any U.S. site quoted me.

Even if you dont have a travel-friendly credit card, it still might be worth it to pay the
fees just to pay in pesos. In this case, the standard foreign transaction fee 3% surcharge
would only cost you an extra $2.16 to book the flight. The exact percentage will vary
depending on the terms of the card issuer, but in short, you still come out ahead.
With a little adjustment, this trick can also be used for purchasing international flights.
The most obvious points-of-sales to check for generally include the destination country
and the country where the airline is based in. I mean, you can also go ahead and check
for every single country out there, but thats real dedication that even I dont have time
for.
Though most of the time it works out that I get some sort of discountwhich can range
from a few dollars to over a hundred dollarsby leveraging foreign currencies against
each other, it doesnt always work all the time. Sometimes, in fact, the cheapest airfare is
the most straightforward fare youll find. But hey, just so you know.
This article originally appeared on Map Happy.
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