Stay Safe With a VPN When Booking Flights (and Save Money, Too)Using a VPN whenever you browse online for airline tickets is a great way to protect your online privacy and keep your data secure. It even helps you find cheaper fares.
When you use a VPN to find and book your next flight, a VPN keeps you safe by:
- Protecting your data – all the top VPN providers use AES-256 levels of encryption, to protect all the data you send over the internet, and route your data through a VPN tunnel, shielding your information from interception and viewing by unintended third parties.
- Hiding your IP address – this prevents airlines from tracking and storing data about you.
A VPN can also help you find cheaper ticket prices by:
- Escaping algorithms – with a VPN, you keep the airlines from tracking and saving data about you to use against you (in the form of higher fares) in your subsequent searches.
- Spoofing your location – a VPN lets you comparison shop from different countries to find the lowest price, no matter where you’re physically located.
When it comes to the best VPN for helping you find cheap flights, we recommend CyberGhost. They are inexpensive and offer plenty of servers, meaning you can price shop almost anywhere to find the best price.
Want to know more about how a VPN keeps you safe when shopping for your next flight and how it might even save you money? Read our full article below.
When you’re ready to jet off on your next trip, finding a cheap flight to save money is usually the first thing on the planning list. With countless travel websites at your fingertips, finding and booking that flight is easier than ever.
But if you aren’t using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to book flights online, you’re exposing yourself to unnecessary risk. You’re also probably increasing flight prices without even realizing it.
Read on to find out how a VPN keeps you safe when booking your next flight and helps you find cheaper flights, too.
How Using a VPN for Flights Keeps You Safe
Going online without using a VPN is like driving your car and not wearing a seatbelt. You can do it, but why? Just like your car includes features to keep you protected on the road, VPNs keep you safer and more secure when you head out on the information superhighway. They do so in several ways.
A VPN conceals your data
A VPN encrypts all your internet traffic the moment it leaves your device. Our top recommended VPN providers use AES 256 levels of encryption – the strongest technology available today – to protect your sensitive data.
Your data traffic is also routed through a private, anonymous VPN tunnel, making it extremely difficult for unintended third-parties to intercept and view your information. This added protection is especially important when you’re providing your credit card details to buy airline tickets on an airline or travel website.
A VPN hides your IP address
Using a VPN makes you anonymous on the internet by masking your IP address. When you open a browser and visit a website without using a VPN, your personal IP address is available to the sites you visit. When sites know your IP address, they can track your behavior, identify your location, and even figure out who you are.
A VPN changes your IP address and lets you appear to be from someplace other than where you are physically located. Since airlines are notorious for tracking and storing data and using this data to calculate ticket prices, you can hide your IP address and keep this information from them by using a VPN anytime you’re browsing travel sites for airline tickets.
A VPN ensures your privacy online
Accessing the web via a VPN also keeps your internet activity private. The best VPNs use “no log” policies and operate from locations outside the reach of the 5 Eyes, 9 Eyes, and 14 Eyes countries. Although searching for flights doesn’t seem like a particularly risky task, it might be if your travel involves a destination within a highly restrictive regime.
With censorship at an all-time high in countries like China and Russia, it never hurts to be as discreet as possible when using the internet to search flights to or from those places. Even if you’re just going from New York to Miami, shielding your IP address from prying eyes is always a good idea. You never know who might be watching or why.
How a VPN Helps You Find Cheap Flights and Save Money
It’s no secret that airlines collect and use your data to determine the fares they offer when you book flight tickets online. Airlines use AI technology and complicated algorithms to calculate ticket prices that maximize profit. An airline feeds this technology with whatever information you give them when you use their sites to look for flights. This is bad news for the unwitting flyer looking for cheap tickets.
Escape the airline algorithms by hiding your IP address with a VPN
When you open your browser without using a VPN to book flight tickets, you’ve already given the airlines the upper hand. They have your IP address, which tells them who you are and where you are located. This is the kind of information every airline loves. They’ll log your IP address information and save it for later, as this boosts their profits. They might also install cookies in your browser, allowing them to track you. More on this in a second.
If you’re like most people hoping to score the lowest fare for a flight, you’re not going to buy that plane ticket on your first search. You’re going to wait and run your search a few more times to see if the price has gone down over time. You also might start searching different airline or travel booking sites in search of lower fares. It’s human nature to want to save some cash, especially on airline tickets. Unfortunately, since you aren’t using a VPN to disguise your IP address, the airlines know who and where you are, and they’ll use your information against you later on.
Remember the information the airlines previously saved when you didn’t use a VPN the first time you were browsing for cheap flights? Here’s where it comes into play. An airline takes your saved data and uses it to increase the flight prices when you search again without a VPN. In marketing terms, this strategy is based on the scarcity principle, and it never works in favor of a reluctant buyer who wants something enough to search for it more than once. You can avoid giving the airlines your information by always using a VPN to hide your IP address and clearing your cookies with every search. You can also save money on subscriptions with a VPN if you want more discounts!
Spoof your location with a VPN
There are other ways airlines use your data against you. For example, buying a plane ticket sometimes costs more simply because of the country you’re in. Searching for plane tickets in an affluent country, like the United States or the Netherlands, often results in higher prices than doing that same search in a lower-income country like India or Venezuela. You can use a VPN to change your location and compare prices in different countries to find cheaper flights. You might even see different flight options when you use a VPN to search from another country.
To see what happens when we search using different countries, we ran a test on a flight between Atlanta and Mumbai. When we searched from the US without a VPN, the best price was $689 on KLM. When we did the same search using a VPN to spoof our location as India, the price for the flight was $635.
Avoid customer profiling with a VPN
Airlines are experts at customer profiling and using this information to their benefit. This means one person might see one price while a different person doing the same search at the same time might see a different price.
An airline relies on many things when determining what ticket prices to offer you, even down to the type of device you’re using. Logging in from an affluent location or with the newest iPhone? Your flight might just get more expensive. When you use a VPN to cloak your IP address, you fight back against this airline strategy.
How to Use a VPN to Find Cheap Flights
If you’re new to using a VPN, you might wonder how you can use one to find cheap flights. The process is very straightforward.
- Select the VPN provider of your choice, for example CyberGhost. Below, we offer our thoughts on why we think this is the best VPN for this purpose.
- Install the VPN software on your device.
- Open the VPN software and connect to the desired country. This could be your destination country, the airline’s home country, or a low-income country like, for example. India.
- Once you’re connected, clear your cookies or use incognito mode.
- Open a browser and start searching for your cheap flights!
You might have to change between server locations in order to find the cheapest prices for your particular flight, but that’s it! It really is that easy to start saving money on airfare.
Choosing the Best VPN for Cheap Flights
Today’s top VPN service providers all offer excellent products that help you find cheap fares and book online flights safely. The service you choose really depends on the features most important to you. Some users want the fastest VPN provider. Others have price as their main consideration. All of the best VPN providers do a great job at hiding your IP address.
We regularly compare current VPN providers on the market to determine our top picks. You can review our recommendations of the Best VPN Providers for 2021 to find the one that best meets your needs. All our recommended VPN providers offer top notch privacy and security and server locations around the world. This gives you maximum flexibility to find the cheapest fares and keep your private data out of the airlines’ hands.
CyberGhost: The best VPN for booking flights
When it comes to using a VPN to find cheap flights, we suggest CyberGhost, for three reasons:
- They have thousands of servers spread across more than 90 countries. This makes it easy to comparison-shop ’til you drop using virtually any country combinations.
- The monthly cost is exceptionally budget-friendly. Why stop at saving on flights? You can save money each month on a VPN service, too.
- They offer a robust 45-day money back guarantee, one of the most generous in the industry. Take your time finding those cheap flights, then try streaming a whole new Netflix catalog with your VPN. You’ll have plenty of time to decide if a VPN is right for you.
- Very user-friendly
- High quality for a low price
- Torrents and Netflix possible
Final Thoughts
Nothing beats a VPN to keep you safe and find the best flight prices online. A VPN protects you whenever and wherever you’re browsing the internet, even when you’re using public Wi-Fi at a café halfway around the world.
But online safety isn’t just something to think about when it’s time to plan your next holiday. Whether you’re streaming your favorite television show, paying bills, or browsing your favorite news website, taking steps to maintain privacy and security online is something we should all be doing these days.
Other ways to increase your safety online include using antivirus software and two-factor authentication. These strategies provide additional layers of protection from the constant threats we all face when we’re online.
Still have questions? Check out our most commonly asked questions below. If you can’t find what you need, simply drop us a line in the comments section, and we’ll get back to you.
In most countries, A VPN is a perfectly legal tool in your arsenal for staying safe while surfing the web, no matter what information you’re looking for. While the airlines and booking sites might not like you hiding your personal data from them, there’s nothing illegal about you doing so. However, there are a few places in the world where using a VPN might get you in trouble.
If you fly a lot, the savings you’ll get when using a VPN to find cheap tickets will offset the price of the VPN service. Even if you get on a plane only once or twice a year, the VPN will offer you value well beyond your periodic airline ticket searches, since it offers privacy and security anytime you go online.
A country’s relative wealth and stability seems to be directly correlated to higher prices on plane tickets. Countries with lower average incomes tend to deliver cheaper flight prices than more affluent countries. Of course, this can vary depending on other factors, like the time of year, current events in a country, and even your final destination.
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