Airfare is one of the biggest expenses for travel. However there’s a powerful tool for finding cheap airline tickets. It’s called Matrix, and today I’m going to show you how to use it to find the best airfares.
Background
ITA Matrix is owned by Google and serves as the software behind Google’s Flight Search engine. It also powers the app OnTheFly, which has been discontinued. There’s more to its history if you’re interested, but that will serve for our purposes.
Find Cheap Airline Tickets
ITA Matrix is fairly intuitive. You can select one-way, round trip, or multi-city itineraries. Enter the city or airport code, dates, and number of passengers and ITA Matrix will generate a list of available flights.
You can filter results by departure time, arrival time, flight duration, number of stops, and a host of other factors. You can also filter by airline.
Taking it to the next level – advanced routing codes
One of the most powerful features of ITA Matrix is the ability to use advanced routing codes. You can find the full list here. These routing codes allow you to:
- Include only flights operated by specific airlines
- Include only a particular alliance (Star Alliance, One World, Sky Team)
- Search for flights with a layover in a specific airport
- Avoid a specific airport
For example, using the code “F ~AA” (without the quotation marks) will search for routes with exactly two flights and exclude routes where the second flight is on American Airlines.
One caution, you cannot purchase airline tickets directly from ITA Matrix. It will give you a booking code, however, that you can give to a travel agent to book your tickets.
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