This Hack Can Get You Dirt Cheap Flights to Thailand

Thrillist

There are few feelings as satisfying as the one you get when realize you've pulled a fast one on an airline by unearthing jaw-droppingly cheap plane tickets to somewhere you've been dying to visit. So, it may be wise to prepare yourself for some next-level smugness once you learn just how easy it can be to hop a flight to Southeast Asia from all over the US for around $400.

You may want to sit down for this. Ideally near a computer you can use to request vacation time.

This particular hack involves booking what are known in the cheap airfare biz as "open jaw" flights, or roundtrip tickets where you fly back from a different city than you initially arrived in. In this case, that might mean flying into Bangkok, Thailand and flying back to the US from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This may sound complicated, but flights connecting many Southeast Asian cities can often be found for under $50.

Of course, since getting the best deal will require essentially booking two one-way flights, you'll need to do some guess-and-check work to figure out the dates with the best fares. As Scott's Cheap Flights recently pointed out in regard to finding these particular crazy-affordable fares to Southeast Asia, departures and returns on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays generally yield the lowest prices. 

google flights search

Scott's Cheap Flights also points out that there are currently incredibly good deals on flights into and out of Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Shanghai, and Singapore from eight major US cities -- Chicago, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. -- for travel between September and April. As of this writing, there are still many standout deals available via Google Flights' multi-city feature in the $400-$500 range ("normal" roundtrip fares for the same time period can exceed $900). That said, airfare is famously unpredictable, so these killer flight prices and the cities they're available to could skyrocket or change at any moment. 

However, even if you strike out finding a wildly inexpensive flight to Thailand worth jumping on this time around, don't give up on the "open-jaw" search strategy. Try searching similarly for one-way flights to and from different easily accessible cities around the world and you could end up getting a whole lot more vacation bang for your buck. 

h/tScott's Cheap Flights

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Joe McGauley is a senior writer for Thrillist. Follow him @jwmcgauley.