The One Thing You Need to Do Now to Save Money on Airfare in 2018

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With 2018 quickly approaching, now is the perfect time to start planning next year's vacations.

To make sure you get the best possible price on airfare — without hinging all of your bets on a flash sale or mistake fare — set airfare alerts for all the trips you want to take next year. It's the single best (and easiest) thing you can to do to save money on your upcoming travels.

Related: How to Travel Better: A T+L Master Class

A number of flight deal websites and search engines make it easy to set custom notifications for price drops. There are also subscription e-mail services and “farecasting” apps that will guarantee you’re the first to know about sales or low prices on your preferred routes.

Follow these three steps, and you won’t pay for an overpriced flight on any of your upcoming travelers.

1. Download these apps.

Even if you haven't decided where you're going in 2018, download DealRay and Hopper right now. These apps serve two very different purposes, but are both key to scoring deals on flights.

Hopper uses a mix of historical data and current fares searches to produce a custom calendar highlighting the best (and worst) times to travel to your specific destination. The app will tell you how much the price is likely to fluctuate, and can watch your preferred trip, sending notifications when it thinks you should book for the best price.

Since the app debuted in 2015, it has added suggested deals you may not have known you wanted (like flash sales for similar trips or discounts on flexible dates) and a flexible flight watch feature to help you find savings when you’re able to accommodate different destinations and travel dates.

For travelers more interested in spur of the moment bookings, DealRay, a desktop and mobile members-only service, that sends real-time alerts and push notifications when it finds sales or mistake fares (like super-cheap flights to the Maldives for $526 round-trip).

2. Set alerts for specific trips.

Whether you like to hunt for airfare on Google Flights or Momondo, most flight search engines are now capable of evaluating ticket prices and telling you whether to buy or wait for a better deal.

On Google Flights, you can select “track prices” to watch fares on specific routes. With Momondo, that’s called “fare alert.” Skyscanner users can select “get price alerts.”

Travelers who search on KAYAK will always see the website’s advice in the top left corner, which will suggest buy now, wait, or watch. KAYAK will even give an estimate as to how much the airfare will rise or fall, helping you gauge whether or not it’s worth the risk.

Related: There's No ‘Magic Day’ When Airfares Get Cheap

And by simply entering your home airport and dream destination in Airfarewatchdog.com, you’ll see the lowest possible ticket price on sale at the time, the cheapest round-trip fares every month, and have the option to instantly set an e-mail alert for price drops.

3. Sign up for email deals.

In addition to setting alerts for all the trips you know you want to take, travelers should be prepared to book spontaneous flights, too. Like the DealRay app, Thrifty Traveler and Scott’s Cheap Flights are subscription services that will notify you when there’s a serious deal worth booking — even if the destination hadn’t been on your radar at all. Instead of a push notification, however, they send e-mail blasts to subscribers.

Last year, Thrifty Traveler alerted us to $313 round-trip tickets to Singapore, while Scott’s Cheap Flights filled us in on $352 round-trip flights to Hawaii.

Both websites offer free and premium services, depending on your level of commitment to scoring a deal.

iPhones Have a Secret Menu That Filters Out Annoying Emails

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First, a confession: I check my work email account on vacation.

Before I am chided for doing so, let's admit this is not unusual in 2019, and also let it be known that I take all of my vacation days (ahem, other millennial women). Also, I am of Camp Check But Do Not Respond, because keeping an eye on work is not actually “working,” per se. (Or is it?)

For years, I’d found it helpful for my personal sanity to spend a few precious PTO minutes to check in each day after having set my out-of-office response. Though over the past few months, my inbox volume has grown substantially, and this no longer works. Checking in to find 352 new messages awaiting my return after one (yes, one) singular day off does not impart a sense of calm.

When I did surmount that message mound, only about six of them were actually important: requests from my boss, questions from coworkers, or updates I’d been waiting on in ongoing conversations. As it turns out, there’s a button on my iPhone that could have determined this for me in seconds, saving a whole long weekend’s worth of stress as I watched that notification number proliferate at the bottom of my phone.

I discovered this feature entirely by accident. I was scrolling through my email while walking and, as one does, almost dropped my phone. It so happened that the angle of the catch activated a filter feature that I had hitherto not noticed and immediately emptied my inbox. After a few seconds of hot panic, I was thrilled to see I had not, in fact, deleted everything; I had just selected a filter to display only my Unread mail, which was none.

Upon further investigation, I found there are six delicious ways to sort your phone’s email inbox using said filter, most with no more effort than the touch of two buttons. You. Are. Welcome.

How to change your email filter settings

At the bottom left corner of your inbox, there is an icon that looks like a circle with three lines in it. Tapping it will automatically apply a filter for Unread, but tapping the text at the bottom center of the screen that says, “Filtered by: Unread,” will open a menu that provides several other options for displaying your mail. If you keep Unread checked, it will hide all opened messages, but turning it off will immediately bring them back. This functionality applies to all filters.

Checking “Flagged” will show only the messages that you have pegged as important, so if there is a specific conversation you’d like to watch or follow up on, you can flag it, and have it be the only thing that interrupts your holiday bliss. The “Addressed” category will let you determine if you want to see only messages are sent to you directly or only those that you are copied on. And you can also tell your inbox to let only mail with attachments come through.

The last option, “Only from VIP,” requires a bit more configuring, but I think this one’s the most helpful of the bunch. Before activating, you’ll need to go into your inbox or your contacts, whichever is easiest, and tap “Add to VIP” on the senders you’d like to see messages from. They’ll get a fancy star symbol next to their names in your inbox, and you’ll become the uncompromising bouncer of your inbox simply by turning on the VIP-only setting.

If you’d only like to receive the email sent from your boss directly to you, with attachments, as part of an important conversation, you can turn them all on at once, too. An empty inbox honestly sounds like a mini-vacation in and of itself.

For those who'd really like to delight in oblivion, I also recommend turning off all notification badges (formally, “red bubbles”). Even with the filters turned on, those pesky phone pimples will still include the full count of new messages coming into your inbox, because they’re technically still there, just hidden. To stop this nonsense, go into your Notifications settings, and under Mail, give that “Allow Notifications” button a good old fashioned left swipe.

You can also customize settings per each account, and if you do have those VIPs turned on, the settings in that category will override the top-level switch and you will see the bubble blow up for those messages.

Just be careful. Otherwise, you may start using your phone less and perhaps even break your email addiction, and I wouldn’t want to be to blame for that grand misfortune.