Using ITA Matrix to find flights: Newark to Istanbul RT for <$500

By the time I get this post up, this deal will probably be dead. But as of 2:21 PM EST on Thursday 1/31, you can fly round trip from Newark to Istanbul for $494 per person during President’s Week. There are sub 500 flights from Dulles and O’Hare as well, though not during President’s Week. I’m going to use this great flight deal for a tutorial on how to use ITA Matrix, my favorite flight search tool.

ITA Matrix is probably the most powerful flight search tool out there with one major caveat: you can’t book the tickets directly through the site. But what it lacks there, it makes up for with a wide array of search parameters. You can specify what cities you want to route through, narrow down flights by airline, alliance, fare class, layover time, and a whole lot of other things. So as not to reinvent the wheel, feel free to read Hack My Trip’s informative tutorial on ITA Matrix here, here, and here.

If that’s too in depth for you, here’s how I would use ITA Matrix to help book these cheap fares from Newark to Istanbul.

Step 1: Use Calendar Search to find lowest fares for the month

This one is pretty straightforward, and like most flight search engines. I find the difference is ITA sometimes sniffs out fares that others don’t. It’s pretty straightforward, choose a day to start searching from and ITA will search a month out from there. Then you can type in the number of nights you’d like to stay in your destination, including a range. You can of course search for exact dates as well.

Step 2: Select your preferred date

Once you hit search, a calendar of fares pops up. You can mouse over each day to see options for number of nights (only the cheapest option shows up on the calendar). From there you can click on the date and number of nights you prefer.

Step 3: Select your preferred itinerary, write down the flight numbers.

After you select a date, a bunch of itineraries will pop up like any search engine. As in all the others, the cheapest options will be at the top. At this point, when you see an itinerary you like, I’d suggest you write down the flight numbers.

One thing to note (and one thing I love about ITA) is that you can view your flights in three different ways: complete trips, individual flights, and time bars. Complete trips gives you entire itineraries, individual flights allows you to choose one leg at a time, and time bars are for the more visually oriented (they look like Hipmunk). In this case, I just chose the top flight.

Step 4: Find the flights

At this point, it’s time to figure out how to book these flights online. This is the trickiest part of using ITA. My general suggestions are to start with the OTAs like Kayak and Orbitz. The problem is, sometimes these search engines can’t find the same flights. I put the same flights into Kayak and this is what I got:

That just won’t do. The next thing I usually do is go straight to the airlines’ websites themselves. In this case, when I plug the dates I wanted into delta.com, these were my results:

The cheapest flight on delta.com is $500. Close! But still not the exact flights we found on ITA. So I want to see if I could do better. Instead of organizing results by price, I organize them by “schedule” (all flights). You can see this on the left column. Once I do that, I get something that looked like this:

On this page, you can choose the flights you want to buy by schedule, NOT price. For some reason, when I choose the same flights that I wrote down from ITA, I get this for my final price:

Well, hello! $494 per person, thank you very much! I’ve replicated the exact flights I found on ITA. How did ITA find them when those flights weren’t even at the top of delta.com’s list and non-existent according to Kayak? I have no idea. All I know is that ITA tells me that the flights EXIST, and with some work, I can find them.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully this post illustrates some of the power behind ITA Matrix. If you live near Newark, why not take a trip to Istanbul this February? As I said before, there are similar prices from Dulles and O’Hare, so feel free to mess around with ITA Matrix and find those as well. I’m surprised these fares are still there (they were posted last night), and as I said, could be gone any minute now. All the US carriers have a 24 hour cancellation policy, so one could always book first and cancel later if necessary. I wish I could book these flights, but it’s probably not prudent to take a 1 month old baby to Turkey. But maybe I can convince the Points Hater tonight!