How to find cheapest flights
Find cheapest flights direct with airline: British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, Flybe, Jet2, TAP, Qantas, Finnair, KLM, Lufthansa, Scandinavian Airlines, Singapore Airlines, BMI, Swiss International Airlines, Emirates, Etihad, Thomson, Thomas Cook, Taca, Brussels Airlines, Royal Brunei Airlines, Iceland Express, Air France, Monarch.
Or with a travel agent: Expedia, Ebookers, Lastminute, Laterooms, Sunshine, Monster Travel, Flightline, Netflights, Travelpack.
Best websites for finding cheap flight deals from the UK
There is no guaranteed method for finding the cheapest airfares. A lot depends on where you’re flying to, when you’re flying and which airport you wish to fly from. However, I generally find the following sites very helpful:
Skyscanner is generally my first port of call for European flights – its coverage of European budget airlines is superb. More to the point, it is the most flexible of all the flight search sites – Skyscanner is brilliantly designed.
Skyscanner’s weaknesses become apparent when you start looking further afield. It can be quite weak on long haul destinations – particularly ones where a change of plane is needed – with prices not being particularly accurate.
If you (roughly) know your dates, then Kayak generally comes up with the best deals for long haul flights. Its coverage of European budget airlines is weak, however.
A good alternative to Kayak – and you should always check both with long haul flights. Travelsupermarket generally plucks the best deals from travel agencies and online booking sites, while Kayak is best for direct deals from the airlines.
The third option that should be checked is Cheapflights. It plucks deals from an extraordinary range of sources – including some small travel agents with phone only deals. Cheapflights will often have the extraordinarily cheap deals that other sites will miss out on, but it can be time-consuming trying to find them. The problem is that some of the agents quote prices that are not available on any dates you try. Again, Cheapflights works better for long haul flights than short haul and European flights.
If you’ve not decided where to go yet, Travelzoo is superb in terms of getting inspiration – and information on where’s cheap at the moment. Its weekly Top 20 deals mailout is hugely popular, but Travelzoo becomes more helpful when you start investigating the site. Flights and holidays are broken down by region – and only the most eye-catching deals are listed. More importantly, Travelzoo’s staff check all the deals for availability.
Airline websites
Usually the cheapest deals with any particular airline can be found at that airline’s website. Of course, this requires you to know which airline you wish to travel with…
For complex itineraries involving multiple stops, it is invariably better to go through a specialist travel agent. I find the guys at Roundtheworldflights extremely knowledgeable, and adept at saving me a fortune with big trips.
Charter Flight Centre is less well known, and is somewhat limited in its scope, but it can come up with astonishing deals. It concentrates on destinations served by airlines that operate both charter and scheduled flights, s/uch as Thomas Cook and Thomson.
As such, the best deals are only ever to popular package destinations (such as Cancun and the Dominican Republic), but the flights are sold off cheap when they’re not full. Thus there are some incredible late deals to be had for destinations such as the Caribbean, Cape Verde, Egypt and Florida.
