Having recently spent a couple of days in London and last week spent a few days in Rome it reminded me yet again how complicated it is to find flights at the best price, whether you are planning a summer holiday or a weekend getaway.
The real question we always want answered is pretty simple and always something like ‘I want to fly from somewhere within a couple of hours of where I live to somewhere within a couple of hours of my destination’.
For example, if we are flying to, say, Scotland we aren’t too bothered whether we leave from Bergerac, Toulouse or Bordeaux and not too bothered if we arrive in Glasgow or Edinburgh – but we are sure we want a bargain price or we’ll wait for another time.
I’m guessing almost everyone has the same general challenge – no flight search that I know of reliably says ‘why not fly from Toulouse at 4pm instead of Bordeaux at 5pm and you can get a flight for £50 instead of £150′.
The problem has been partly solved by a new search from skyscanner which lets you specify a destination and will then give lots of options of where you could fly from at lowest cost, so solves half the problem – try it here if you are planning to visit France this summer…
…but it still doesn’t guarantee that I will see if a flight is available for half the price if I am more flexible with my plans.
Does anyone know a better flight search or a better way to say ‘I want to go to London for a weekend in March – what’s the cheapest way to travel?’
I don’t think there is any easy way. Ryanair says it doesn’t appear on comparison price websites, born out by it insisting on entering one of these unreadable security codes before its website releases flight information. This is apparently to stop web-bots crawling its website to find out best prices. Easyjet might appear on price comparisons but the company regularly issues discount codes and you might find that you can make considerable savings by deploying one of these. I doubt if price comparison sites will say ‘Oh by the way if you use code xxxyyy then you can save £20′. Another tip I heard – not sure if it’s true – is that if you’ve browsed the likes of Ryanair without booking then return to look again at a later date, clearing you browser cookies may assist in making sure that Ryanair treats you as a new web-visitor and you might get a better price.
Hi Ricky,
The skyscanner site includes ryanair which is why I prefer it to the others, although I noticed it said ‘price checked 24 hours ago’ so perhaps they have an issue with collecting very up to date information. I don’t remember seeing easyjet though.
I was also just looking at flights to Italy from France and they even suggested ‘fly a day later and you could save £27′ which is quite a breakthrough (the option to see bargains is quite hard to spot though).
I think from our experiences that you are quite possibly right about ryanair cookies – because we have more than one computer around the house we usually do a final check on a computer where no search has previously taken place, although a different browser or clearing cookies would of course do the same thing.
Hi Boris, perhaps its where you live move house to Hounslow Middx or Crawley sussex, loads of flight options there.
I lived in Hounslow for three months in 1985. That was enough.
I’m afraid there’s no real substitute for trawling Ryanair, easyJet and BA sites every time you want to book a flight. We use just Carcassonne and Toulouse which usually gives enough options for just about anywhere.
Unfortunately I think you’re right. I guess I shouldn’t complain, just be grateful we have about 4 airports within reach of here.
For anyone living more over this way Bordeaux seems to have more cheap flights than it used to (they now have a ‘low cost airline’ terminal).