Because of the nature of my job, my colleague Dean Kirkland WA resident like myself and long term business partner, are regularly traveling all over the world for our work. During our trips we will always use flights to get there faster and whether we are going between Washington and Vancouver or across the seas to London, we always give a great deal of attention to finding the cheapest flights possible. We have a small business which can not afford to pay for too many expenses, with this in mind here are the ways in which we work on bringing the cost of our flights down.
Credit Cards
For anyone who does a lot of flying I would recommend that you get a credit card which offers air miles when you spend money. I started doing this last year and despite never wanting to have credit card in the past, I finally realized the benefits which having one can give you. I use my credit card for almost every purchase throughout the month and then clear it at the end, for these payments I gain many travel miles and last month for example I flew from San Fran to Shanghai for absolutely nothing, using only my available points.
Connections
If you are not in a mad rush to get to your destination, but you want to try and save money, why not look at flights which connect in other cities or countries. For example last year I was flying from Vancouver to Edinburgh for a meeting and I ended up saving over $500 on my flight because I flew down to Miami and direct to Edinburgh from there. The overall flight tie was only 4 hours longer than the direct route and I saved a great chunk of money. Check out a website like Kayak to find which flights you can choose that offer connections and cheaper fares.
Websites
I never book my flights directly from the airline page and I instead choose to use 2 very similar websites to book my trips. The first website which I will check is SkyScanner, a flight aggregator which searches the web for you to bring you the very cheapest flights that are available. The second site which I use is called Momondo and this does pretty much the same thing as SkyScanner. The reason I use both websites is because occasionally one will have a flight that the other one does not. These sites not only show you the cheapest flights but they also have a shed load of different filters that you can use to get you the flight that you want at the time that you want. You can use these sites to book multi-city trips and you can search by month to find the cheapest month to fly. If you are looking for the very cheapest flights online, these are the sites which you should be using to get just that.