This Search Engine That Gives You The Cheapest Flights From Any Location Is A Super Cool Travel Hack

If you're having trouble deciding which city or country to visit for your next holiday, travel search engine Escape is a pretty nifty tool that will help you map out your best options.

For the upcoming Memorial Day weekend, for instance, Escape showed me the cheapest tickets I could get flying out of New York City. If I wanted to stick to places in the US, plane tickets between New York City and Worcester, Massachusetts were the cheapest at $118. If, however, I wanted to go to Europe, I could consider going to Edinburgh for the price of $540.

One of the most interesting features of Escape is that it provides you with many different filters to fiddle with. The top options Escape gave me changed after I had adjusted the settings to only include locations that were warmer in weather and places that were more "popular," an index calculated based on a country's tourism ranking and check-ins/reviews from travelers on social media. I also switched it to direct flights only.

With those filters in place, the locations with the cheapest plane tickets from New York City changed in every continent. Instead of Worcester, I could consider going to Washington DC for the slightly higher fare of $158. And in lieu of Quito, Ecuador, my best option in South America was now Bogota, Colombia, although the plane ticket would cost twice as much.

While there are already plenty of ways for you to search for the cheapest plane tickets between two locations online, such as Kayak, Expedia and Skyscanner, Escape is probably most useful for those who haven't decided on where they want to go yet and who might be swayed by the price of a plane ticket. 

And even if you don't have immediate plans to travel, it's still a pretty fun way to pass your time, imagining all the places you could potentially visit for the price of a couple of hundred of dollars. Traveling may be expensive, but dreaming is still free, after all.

[H/T Flowing Data]