If you don’t spend all day staring at airfares and hotel rates, you might not know how much they fluctuate. The same trip can vary by hundreds of dollars from day to day. That can make it hard to know whether you’re getting a good deal or not. Luckily, you’ve got Bing Travel’s deal-finding tools to help you out. We can help you find great deals on airfare and tell you when’s the right time to buy. We can help you find great deals on hotels and figure out which hotel to book. We can even help you decide where to go!

 

Now, some people think we have so many deal-finding tools that it can be hard to know where to begin. That’s why I’m here to point you in the right direction. In the coming weeks, I’ll walk you through how to use our super-powerful Flexible Travel tools and our Price Predictor and Hotel Rate Indicator tools that help you make better decisions about when to book your airfare or hotel room.

 

But right now, let’s talk deals.

 

Air deals

 

If you’re looking for a cheap flight, a good place to start is our airline ticket deals page.

 

 

This page shows you the top flight deals, record low prices, last-minute deals and more, all based on analysis of the billions of airfares we’ve collected over the past several years.

 

The default page shows deals to and from all the cities we track. But you’re probably more interested in deals from your hometown. So, to narrow the options, expand “deals from origin cities” at the top right:

 

 

Since I live in Seattle, I’ll click the link for the Seattle page:

 

 

That airfare to San Diego seems good; I could visit my friends Ted and Erin. But two days doesn’t sound like long enough for this trip. Let me click on “View more dates” to see if there are any return dates with an equally good price.

 

 

I can see there’s a Wednesday return that would be much better for me. I click on it, then on “find flights.”

 

 

There’s my deal! And the Price Predictor says “Buy.” So I should probably tell Ted and Erin to clear some space on their couch.

 

“That’s great for you, Joel,” you’re thinking, “but I don’t know Ted and Erin, and they’re probably not going to let a stranger stay on their couch.” That’s why Bing Travel also offers a tool that helps you determine whether a hotel is a deal … or not a deal.

Hotel deals

 

When looking for hotel deals, you’ll need to do a search first. I changed my itinerary back to a Thursday-Saturday trip, because I wouldn’t stay as long in San Diego if I weren’t visiting friends.

 

 

I’m a 4-star-hotel kind of guy, so I click on the 4-star filter on the left.

 

 

And it so happens that I have a collection of Starwood points I wouldn’t mind adding to.

 

The Rate Indicator says there’s a “DEAL” at the Sheraton. Let’s click on that and see the details:

 

 

It looks like the weekend rate is 25% below the typical price I’d pay to stay at this hotel. Sounds awesome. (If you’re wondering about that big ugly red bar in late July, that’s Comic-Con weekend. The red color indicates that the rate for those days is not a deal, though you probably could have figured that out on your own.)

 

Those are the basics. Now go find your own deals and let me know if you find any exceptional ones.

 

 

Joel Grus, Fareologist, Bing Travel