You may not want to take trips like that, but you can use their forum to find extremely cheap flight

I've been on an awesome run of trips recently. I've gone to China, Peru, Mexico, and Japan, and have paid $1350 total for all four flights. That's roughly the cost of the normal price of just ONE of the more expensive flights on that list. I have a few tricks baymont inn north kansas city to share with you which are responsible for these four flights.
You may already be aware that there's a group of people online who are completely obsessed with miles and status on airline frequent flyer programs. They all congregate on a site called FlyerTalk.com and discuss mileage runs, which are flights so cheap that it's (nearly) worth going just for the miles. In fact, many members go on trips that last for just hours before they get back on the plane home.
You may not want to take trips like that, but you can use their forum to find extremely cheap flights (and get miles while you're at it). Just go to the Mileage Run subforum and search for your home airport. You can also check out this thread which has deals that are still very cheap but don't earn enough miles to qualify as a mileage run. Sometimes that's because the price is a bit higher, baymont inn north kansas city but often it's because it's an obscure airline with a crappy frequent flyer program or a fare class that doesn't offer miles.
GetGoing is probably my favorite new startup, despite baymont inn north kansas city the fact that they got into Y Combinator and I didn't. The premise is that they have very low fares, but you can't choose exactly which one you want. Instead you pick two that you're willing to go on, put in your credit card info, and then randomly get booked on one of the two.
Good fares are somewhat inconsistent, so make sure to add everywhere you'd like to go as a favorite so that you can look at all possible options. On the West Coast they always seem to have great deals to Hawaii (~$250), so if there's only one great foreign fare, you can use Hawaii as a backup.
Another trick is that if you link your Facebook account with them, you get $25 off your first flight. That would have dropped my China trip down to $455 if they were running the promo back then. And if you refer friends (as I'm doing here ), you get $50 if they book a flight within 90 days.
I learned this trick from my friend Jenna Meister , who found both the Peru ($284) and Japan ($315) flights. Very occasionally, airlines will have ridiculously low fares for very short amounts of time. If you set up alerts properly in Kayak, you can get emailed whenever something good comes along.
To set these up, go to kayak.com/alerts and click "Add a flight price alert". Click "Top 25 Cities" and enter in your home airport and the region that you're interested in. Fill out your max price, switch the frequency to daily, and hit Save. If you want to go to a specific baymont inn north kansas city airport that's not a major hub, you could also add a fare alert for that specific city pair. Besides SFO, I also add OAK, SJC, LAX, and LAS as separate alerts, since it's very cheap for me to get to any of those airports.
You should now get emails occasionally when these deals pop up. It's important to jump on them VERY quickly. Often they evaporate within a few hours if not minutes. You can also check from the Android or iPhone apps throughout the day. I'm not too experienced with this, but Jenna recommends it.
Tynan - This is just the post I needed!  I was looking for "secrets of trade" type post and where to find the pockets of flyer miles that are worth it.  I use the virgin america card a bunch but I know there must be more efficient ways fo flying/acquiring miles.  Thanks for the heads up, I"ll checkout FlyerTalk as well.
I would also add dohop.com  on this list. Dohop is a great flight search engine out of Iceland. They specialize in finding all possible connections that may include budget airlines that are not officially working together and piece together baymont inn north kansas city and itinerary not found by other search engines. They are not as competitive in the US market, but for finding good fares and connections that include low cost airlines in Europe they are great.
I find it to be a great research tool to find out what airlines fly to what airport and to find great prices and connections as they have flight schedules from almost all airlines in the world, small and large, and a great algorithm to calculate connections that are not visible elsewhere.
For the best deals, learn how to read the coded messages in the Tricks thread. Otherwise any one with decent credit (720+) should apply for a few premium baymont inn north kansas city credit cards a year. Getting $5-10k worth of flights per year from cards is not difficult.
Last night I landed in Florence. I had four layovers on the way here, which doesn't sound like a positive thing at first, but I booked them intentionally. Very frequently, if I have a long flight, I'll book tons of long layovers and actually leave the airport on each one.
My first layover was in Newark for almost baymont inn north kansas city five hours, so I rented a car, drove to see my family in New Jersey for a couple hours, and then headed back to the airport. baymont inn north kansas city My next flight brought me to Lisbon for two hours, which was a layover I couldn't avoid, but was too short to enjoy. It was early in the morning when I landed, and it was a short flight to my next destination, Amsterdam, so I got there early as well. I had twenty-two hours in Amsterdam, so I checked into my airport hotel, dropped off my stuff, and headed downtown.
Downtown I had some lunch , visited the Rijksmusem to see the Vermeers (I'm on a pointless quest to see all 34 Vermeers), visited the Van Gogh museum, had dinner, and then walked around the red light district before baymont inn north kansas city heading back to the hotel.
The next morning I woke up early again and headed to Zurich, which I was warned was incredibly boring. I managed to take the least direct train downtown, which gave me a mini tour of the outer edges of the city, I walked down the main shopping street, wandered through baymont inn north kansas city old Zurich, ate a couple Swiss chocolates, spent a lot of time down by the water watching the swans, took some pictures, and then headed back to the airport to work in the Swiss Air lounge. baymont inn north kansas city After eight hours total in Zurich, I headed to Florence.