If you’re anything like me, you want to spend as little as humanly possible on your plane tickets. If this means you have to fly on Air Plus Comet, a cargo plane or as a courier (impossible in this day and age, by the way), it doesn’t matter. As long as you land in Madrid/Ibiza/Topeka ok, you can handle the temporary discomfort.
For this reason, it pays to be flexible on booking flights; we all know that flying on a weekday or off-season is less expensive, but legacy online travel agents like Orbitz and Travelocity make it difficult to do a broad search. Sure, you can sometimes factor in a few days of flexibility or maybe even a week or month. But if you just need to “get to Greece some time next summer for as cheap as possible,” these engines don’t have that capability.
Alternatively, try using Zuji.com, the Singapore-based company loosely associated with Travelocity. If you select “other” as your country and select “flights,” you can run a flex search between any number of months and just ask it to find the cheapest fare across the board. Depending on the strength of the Singapore Dollar you can also occasionally find cheaper standard fares than on a legacy site. Granted, you’re going to have to convert from SGD to USD and they do impose taxes right at the end of the transaction, Zuji is still an excellent resource for research into budget fares. If you have qualms about booking on an offshore site, do your research on Zuji and book through Orbitz or directly through the carrier.