How to find a cheap flight
Searching for a flight, at the best price, and with the more convenient schedule ?
Lot of possibilities are offered to you : specialized search engines, travel agencies, airlines, … The abundance of choices is overwhelming, when not used to plan trips alone, takes a lot of time, and doesn’t always brings the best result.
One of the best solutions, working for frequent travelers, with more than 20 flights a month, is the following.
Even if departure and arrival times, or the travel time, are not flexible, best result is always found in less than an hour by using the main flights comparators, Skyscanner, Kayak, or Where Can I FLY ?
A good starting point is Skyscanner website [1]. This search engine compares flights from hundreds of companies [2], and allows to search precisely by :
- known arrival and departure dates,
- monthly rate comparison,
- yearly rate comparison,
- known or unknown departure and arrival airport (yes – it is possible to lookup by country or just to compare prices for all available destinations).
If you do not know which is the closer airport to your destination (Fig 1), and if it is served by direct or indirect flights from your favorite airport, the map [3] will help you find it out.
Once your dates and places are choose, you can for example only display flights leaving at a given time frame.
You will then be directly redirected to an airline or travel agency, where you will be able to book your flight.
A short example ?
I am for example in Geneva, and want to go to Frankfurt. I do not want to take a day off for this personal trip, and so, want to leave on a Friday after 6pm, and come back on Sunday afternoon. I am flexible on 1st or 2nd weekend of August.
I start with a search for these dates and places (Fig 2), and narrow the search to my time slot (Fig 3).
And then start again the process for next dates (Fig 4), and compare previous results (Fig 5) with the new ones (Fig 6).
Rates, one month before, are the same for these regular flights, which is often the case. So I can choose the one that is the more convenient to me – of course without forgetting to compare prices with other travel agencies and the ones directly on airline’s website. This last check could, in some cases, save up to 5% on the final bill, with fares, taxes, … included !
Links and credits
- [1] – Skyscanner, free flights comparison tool – http://www.skyscanner.com
- [2] – Skyscanner, airlines informations – http://www.skyscanner.com/airlines-all.html
- [3] – Skyscanner, flights and airports map – http://www.skyscanner.com/cheap-flights-map