On the 24th of May, Jetstar had their Birthday Sale and were offering some insane discounts on international flights. They were also giving away free return legs on bookings, making the prices even better.
Some examples for flights from Sydney were Honolulu return for AU$379, Bali return for AU$220 and Phuket return for AU$279. These prices are all exclusive of baggage, seats, food and booking fees but still, pretty incredible.
Jeststar tends to have a one or two really compelling sales a year and there are usually pretty limited seats available at the cheapest prices.
When they launch these sales, understandably, people rush to the website and it gets completely overloaded. Two years ago, I was able to book return flights from Sydney to Bali for AU$160 during one of these sales. It took me about an hour and a half just to get to the search results page. I was working on two laptops just refreshing the page over and over until I got through and I think that was a fairly typical experience for anyone trying to get in on those fares.
What I’ve learned recently is that during these sales, when traffic on the Jetstar website pretty much breaks the internet, the Jetstar app works surprisingly well. On the 24th for example, I found it basically impossible to get anywhere on the website but was just bouncing around on the app finding loads of dates with the Birthday Sale fares.
The app is free to download and super easy to use. The only issue with it is that it doesn’t have the option to see prices for an entire week at a time, meaning you need to click through one day at a time to find availability at the sale fare level. Still, using it during these sales is a massive advantage when competing for the limited inventory available at the lowest price and can potentially save you a bunch of time and frustration.
