As travelers begin figuring out their summer vacation plans, experts recommend using artificial intelligence flight booking technology to find the best deals and stay within budget.
Relying on traditional internet research to compare airline flights may no longer be enough to save money.
"All of the airlines are using AI themselves, so it's not just daily that they're changing fares, hourly, they're doing that in terms of how many demands they have for a particular route and how their competitors are moving," Farhana Nusrat said.
Nusrat, a professor of marketing at the University of San Diego, said travelers will get better results if they use AI flight technology properly. She recommends booking domestic flights one to three months in advance and international flights two to six months in advance.
When using AI tools, travelers should be specific in their prompts.
"The first message you're sending, the first message you're sending has most of the information that's important for you," Nusrat said.
"For example, I can fly any day between June 2nd to June 21st. Any day or time works for me. I live in San Diego, but I'm willing to fly out of LAX or another very close airport where I can drive to," Nusrat said.
There are free online flight booking search services available, such as Google Flights, Kayak, and Skyscanner. Travelers can also sign up for paid subscriptions that track deals and price changes across major and lesser-known airlines. These services typically cost between $30 to $50 a year.
"Either they freeze the price for you for a significant amount of days and let you know if that price goes down, you can buy the cheaper price. But if the price goes up from that, you will not have to pay the higher price because the price was frozen for you," Nusrat said.
"Another thing they can do is find what they call mistake fares. So, an airline, for example, the flight was supposed to be $1,900, but by mistake, in a one-hour window on a Monday, they listed that as a $900 flight. So they can find it very quickly and lock that down before the airline realizes they made a mistake and change that," Nusrat said.
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