Man, finding cheap tickets between Latvia and Albania—or really, any two places far apart that don’t have a direct Ryanair route—is always a headache. It’s not just about hitting the “Search” button. It’s a process, and it usually starts because something went sideways in your life.
I wasn’t planning a scenic Balkan holiday, trust me. I was settled in Riga, working remotely, thinking I had life figured out. I had my routine, my local coffee spot, everything humming. Then, about three months ago, the whole structure just collapsed. Not because of a project failure or anything professional, but because my landlord decided he was selling the whole damn building to a property developer who was going to turn it into luxury condos, effective immediately. I got 30 days notice.
I blew my gasket. Moving in Riga is expensive, short-term accommodation is a rip-off, and frankly, I was burned out on the Nordic weather. I had to pack up my life—my laptop, my two monitors, and a single suitcase—and get the hell out of dodge. I needed warmth, stability, and most importantly, I needed dirt cheap living for a few months while I sorted my butt out. Albania popped up on the radar—Tirana, maybe Durrës—cheap flights in, cheap rent, good food.
But my savings? Thin. Real thin. This move wasn’t a leisure activity; it was a survival maneuver. Every Euro saved on the flight was an extra two meals I could eat in Albania. So I had to become an expert in finding those elusive, cheap biglietti (tickets).
The Necessity Forces the System
I started by hitting the usual mega-sites. You know the ones. They always showed me tickets around €250-€300 with three layovers and a 16-hour travel time. Unacceptable. I needed something under €100, if that was even possible, and I needed to achieve it without using any professional travel agent jargon. This is what I actually did, starting from zero, digging through the digital trash bin until I found gold.
1. Master the Date and Location Flexibility
The first thing I learned quickly is that you cannot be precious about the city you leave from or the day you fly. I started the search rigid: Riga (RIX) to Tirana (TIA) on a Tuesday. I got the high prices. I shifted immediately.
- Broaden the Start Point: Instead of just RIX, I checked major hubs nearby that low-cost carriers use heavily. Warsaw (WAW), Kaunas (KUN), and even Tallinn (TLL). If I could get a $20 bus ride to Kaunas, and save $80 on the flight, that’s a win.
- Target Secondary Airports: In Albania, TIA is the main one, but I checked if there was any cheap route to Podgorica in Montenegro (Tirana is a short bus ride from there) or even if any seasonal flight hit Vlorë.
- The Calendar Trick: I used the “month view” feature on the biggest comparison engine. I didn’t care about Thursday, June 14th. I looked for the absolute cheapest green dot on the calendar for the next four weeks. I found that Tuesday nights and Wednesday mornings were consistently the cheapest slots, especially if they were red-eye flights.
This single step dropped my average search price from €280 to about €160 immediately. Still not cheap enough.
2. Ignore Aggregators, Go Direct
The comparison sites are fine for filtering, but they always add a small fee, and sometimes they miss the absolute bottom-barrel prices offered by the true low-cost guys—Wizz Air and Ryanair.
I found a decent routing: RIX to WAW, then WAW to TIA. The aggregator showed this as two separate tickets, total cost €140. I thought, okay, let’s see what Wizz Air is charging directly for the WAW to TIA leg. It was showing €45. Then I checked airBaltic for the short hop from RIX to WAW. They had a special running for €30 if I booked with no checked bag.
Total self-booked cost: €75.
This is the key: Aggregators are your library, giving you the ISBN number (the routing). You then go to the “publisher” (the airline’s website) to get the best deal. You have to be comfortable booking separate, non-connecting tickets, knowing that if the first flight is delayed, the second one doesn’t care. But when you’re desperate to save money, you take that risk.
3. The Two-Stop Relay (The Hidden Connection)
Sometimes the direct low-cost path doesn’t exist, or it’s sold out. That’s when you have to think about “fake layovers” or relays. You look for the busiest, cheapest central European hub that always has cheap flights to both Northern Europe and the Balkans.
For me, that center point was Milan Bergamo (BGY) or maybe Budapest (BUD).
I stopped searching RIX to TIA. I searched two legs:
- Leg A: RIX to BGY (Found a cheap Tuesday morning Ryanair flight for €35).
- Leg B: BGY to TIA (Found a Wizz Air flight leaving 6 hours later for €40).
This gave me a total travel time of 10 hours and a huge buffer for delays, all for €75. That’s competitive even with the cheapest, direct Wizz Air flights that were long sold out.
The Outcome and the Takeaway
I ended up buying the RIX -> BGY -> TIA relay for €75. I carried my monitors and clothes in two large backpacks—no checked bags, which saves another €40-€50 right there. I landed in Tirana, grabbed the cheap airport bus, and found a basic apartment outside the center quickly.
That immediate crisis—losing my spot in Latvia and needing to move instantly while budgeting for survival—forced me to get hyper-efficient about travel costs. It’s like when I was forced out of my old coding job and had to pivot into embedded systems development just to put food on the table; the sudden necessity sharpened my focus like nothing else.
Now, I look back and realize how much cash I wasted before because I just hit the easy button on travel websites. These three simple steps—flexibility, checking direct carrier sites, and building your own two-stop relay—they saved me enough money to cover my first two weeks of rent here in Albania. If you’re trying to find cheap biglietti for a long haul like Latvia to Albania, stop treating it like a single purchase. Treat it like a three-part engineering problem, and you’ll save a bundle.