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If you haven’t flown much or haven’t flown internationally before, let me go over a few things you should know.

• The earlier you can buy international travel tickets the better. Prices will go up as the flight date approaches. If you’re looking to buy three months or less before the flight date, you are going to pay an extremely high premium for such a short time frame. I’d recommend buying at least six months out.
• Cheap flights can often have some steep downsides. Some will have extremely long layovers. I’ve had flight options with total travel time (including long layovers) reaching 30 to 40 hours in length. I’ve done this before, and it sucks. Unless you really love airports, I cannot recommend spending the night in one. It’s great to save as much money as you can, but you should seriously consider whether a few hundred dollars more is worth it. Those dollars could save you many hours of layover and multiple legs to your trip. If you can be flexible with your dates, check out flights a few days before or after the initial date you chose. You can often find better itineraries that way.
• If you are on any sort of budget, never buy seats anywhere except economy. You can end up spending an absolutely ridiculous amount of money upgrading to business or first class. I can’t imagine any scenario in which a marginal amount of extra comfort on the plane ride is worth hundreds if not thousands of extra dollars. If you think you’ll have a hard time being comfortable sitting in an airplane row for 13 hours, buy a seat that’s at the front of the row or by an emergency door exit. These seats have no rows in front of them and give you as much legroom as you want (you’re also closer to the bathroom which is a big win). A seat with extra leg room will cost you more than other seats in economy, but not nearly as much as upgrading class. Plane travel is uncomfortable no matter which class you’re sitting in.

Planning for a Transfer:

• Check to see if you have a layover with a tight turnaround (anything 1 hour or less). If so, then try to book an economy seat as close to the front of the plane as you can. Offloading a plane takes longer than you think. The sooner you can be on your way to the gate for your next flight, the better.
• When you buy your flight, make sure to check if the baggage is marked as self-transfer or not. This is EXTREMELY important to know. Most of the time when you buy an itinerary, checked baggage is automatically transferred from one flight to the next. However, sometimes the cheapest flight options with multiple journey legs require self-transfer of baggage. What this means is that you are changing airlines or airline partners to a new airline. Your baggage will not be automatically transferred between airlines that are not partners. When you have a self-transfer, once you land you must leave the gate area to collect your checked baggage from baggage claim. You then have to find the check-in area, check your baggage, go through standard security check, and then return to the gate area. You are essentially leaving the airport and coming back in for a new flight. You should only choose self-transfer itineraries if you have ample time in between flights.

Additional Flight Tips:

• For a long flight, I’d recommend trying to fly overnight. If you can sleep during the plane ride, it’ll make a huge difference. It can also help your jet lag sleep schedule depending on your arrival time.
• For some reason, departing flights can be cheaper on Tuesdays. This is by no means a rule, but you can start your search for flights with Tuesdays to see how they compare.
• Bring an eye mask and earplugs. Most overnight flights provide you with a blanket and pillow.
• Take Dramamine or a similar motion sickness pill if you think you might get motion sick. Dramamine can also be used to help you sleep if you buy the drowsy kind.
• If you want to bring your own headphones to watch a movie using the plane’s tv, make sure it has a 3.5mm jack. Bluetooth is not an option in any plane I’ve been on.

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Our flight ticket price breakdown

As you can see, we bought insurance for our flight. Anytime you buy a flight, you will be offered various tiers of insurance with corresponding additional charges. Don’t feel like you have to buy it. I’ve been on many international flights and I’ve never encountered a scenario that required insurance. If you do want the extra security, buy it to cover your big flights. If it’s something smaller, less than $1,000, I wouldn’t worry about it. The main reason we bought it for our New Zealand flight was for Covid cancellation protection. Of course, different insurance coverages offer different things. But if you would like to see what ours covered for $97, here are the details: 

We purchased baggage insurance on most of our flights during our trip, as it was relatively inexpensive. But again, don’t feel like you have to get it.

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Best Sites For Finding Cheap Flights to New Zealand

There are a lot of website options to choose from when you start looking for flights. The ones we used were Cheapflights, Skyscanner, Hopper, and Kiwi.com. I recommend checking all of these sites when you begin looking for flights. They all provide you with good information and filters so you can find the exact kind of flight you need. However, each has a few distinguishing pros that we noticed: 

• If you have the app, Hopper will notify you when tickets for your desired trip become suddenly cheaper and when the best time to buy is. 
• Kiwi’s date display is really handy – you can look at all the dates in a given month and see prices for each one. Even if we didn’t buy through Kiwi, we often would use their calendar display to find the cheapest dates to buy on.

It looks like this:

Kiwi.com

• Kenna’s Choice: Skyscanner is where we bought our New Zealand tickets. They provide simple categories to choose from, such as fastest, cheapest, and best flights available. This was Kenna’s preference because it is easy to navigate and usually includes the price of baggage.
• Jordan’s Choice: Cheapflights is my personal favorite, simply because in my experience it consistently finds cheap flights while also providing options that avoid some of the normal budget flight downsides like long layovers. If you are traveling on the fly and planning as you go, Cheapflights may be your best bet to find very affordable flights that don’t have 20 hour layovers.

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You should know that you are not actually buying flights from these websites. These sites only find good deals for cheap flights across the internet and then send you to whatever site is selling the actual tickets. These sites can either be the airline itself or a third-party. Usually though, the cheapest flights won’t be directly through the airline and will instead come from a third-party site.

The benefit of buying through the actual airline is that if there is an issue with your itinerary (a flight is canceled or you miss a flight), it’s always simpler to talk directly to the airline. If you buy through a third-party and have an immediate problem with your journey, you must reach out to the third-party’s customer service first. You usually can’t deal directly with the airline. However, you can always try calling the airline to see if they will match the price of the third party in order to get a good price combined with direct access to the airline. That being said, airlines are not known for their fast and painless customer service – I once spent 2 whole hours on hold while trying to call Air New Zealand, and they never picked up.

Travel Points (A Great Way to Get Cheap or Even Free Flights)

There has already been a lot written on the topic of travel points and how to use them. I am not an expert in them, but I am a happy user of them! At the end of our 6 months of travel, we were able to use all the points we earned during our travels to fly us home to North Carolina from Venice at no cost to us, with a couple of extra nights at a hotel in the Dolomites covered to boot.

I did some research on credit cards soon after we bought our New Zealand tickets, and the general consensus online was that the Chase Sapphire Preferred card was the best one available. At the time that I applied for the card, the joining deal was that you get 80,000 bonus points when you spend $4,000 in the first three months of owning the card. When used for travel, those 80,000 points equaled $1,000. As you continue to spend money with the card on travel related purchases, you can earn a pretty significant number of points. In the end we racked up around 130,000 points, over $1,500 in value. It paid for what would have been one of our most expensive flights of the trip. The best cheap flights are the ones that you don’t have to pay for! You’ll need an Experian credit score of 690 or more to apply for Chase Sapphire.

In addition to this, travel cards (Chase Sapphire included), do not have international transaction fees. This is tremendously important. If you just use your normal credit or debit card for any purchases overseas, you could be getting charged 1 – 3% on every transaction! This might not seem like much but it will add up quickly. If you are traveling internationally, especially if you’re planning to travel for an extended amount of time, get a travel card without international transaction fees.

Wrapping it up

We hope you found this helpful in taking your first major step in starting your journey! Finding cheap flights to New Zealand can be a complex process and may seem overwhelming. But if you follow these tips and guidelines we hope to make this process much simpler and affordable for you. Thanks for reading!