Haven't you always wondered how to:

• Get  cheap airfare to Paris.
• What city to fly into when going to Florence.
• The best airline for going to Peru.
• When do I purchase my ticket for Madrid or Barcelona.

My answer for the first step in purchasing cheap airfare with a good itinerary is to use a website called www.itasoftware.com.   Airfare cannot be purchased from this website but it is great for finding the best itinerary at the cheapest rate.

In its basic form, the website's search engine lets the user search for flights on  a specific route on specific days.  It will return all flight options.  But let's face it, all search engines do that.   What makes www.itasoftware.com so powerful are the search options like selecting:

Days within a range: (+/- 1 or 2 days, best flights within a month's time, etc.).  

Multiple airports:  For instance, I can fly out of New York  or Boston when I am flying to Paris for instance.  So I can select JFK and BOS in the search criteria and it will return the best city.  When I travel to Florence, Italy, I can check the cheapest flights to Milan, Pisa, or even Rome.  I can often save enough money to make it worthwhile to take the inexpensive train to my destination.

Find the cheapest place to fly from the US into Europe or Peru:  You can name your home airport and then tell the search engine to search for any airport within let's say 25, 50, 100 or even 2,000 miles.  I found this particularly valuable when searching for cheap airfare to Peru.   The flight from Washington DC was over $300 cheaper than flying out of JFK.  I took the $49 train down to DC to catch my flight, visited my son for a day, and saved money going to Peru.

Multiple Cities.  Sometimes when flying into Italy, we arrive in Rome and depart from Venice.   We find the best website to search for airfares to be www.itasoftware.com in this instance.

Best Time to Buy a Plane Ticket:  My experience tells me that about 3 months before an international trip is the best time to buy airfare.  If using frequent flyer miles, however, buy as far in advance as possible.