France This Way...the blog!!

Finding the best (cheapest!) prices for travel is not easy, to say the least, and is often very time-consuming and confusing. Usually the search ends because the time and hassle involved all becomes too much and the customer settles for the best they’ve seen so far.

For cheap car hire in France I’m pretty convinced that we can track down the best prices to offer site visitors through a system that more or less searches all the major brokers – try it out with the search box at our car hire page – it’s amazing to watch, as the best offers from each supplier come whizzing up on your screen. Don’t worry, you can test it without actually booking a car.

Flights from France to the UK are proving to be a trickier beast. Strange as it seems, I don’t think there is a single, central site that successfully checks all the budget airline flights and prices and gives you the choices available. Until yesterday I thought there was, but now learn that what many of the ‘flight checker’ companies do is actually to mark-up the original price by quite a margin. So a Ryanair flight for £10 becomes a Ryanair flight for £30, without the customer realising that the ‘original price’ has been inflated.

That’s not really playing the game – at least, unless it is made clear to the customer that they are paying more than they need, so we have withdrawn our flight price comparison search. Shame, it looked to be very good!

So unfortunately for the moment we can no longer recommend a central ‘flight search’ company and it’s back to the drawing board for us, and for all airline customers trying to travel to France as cheaply as possible.

You want to fly to south-west France from London region, but not especially bothered about which start and end airport you use? You have a long haul ahead of you I’m afraid, with innumerable permutations to consider. And that’s not counting the cheaper flights on the mainstream airlines which further complicate things.

I’ve tried to relieve the burden slightly – at our France flights page I’ve listed all the French airports I can track down, along with all the airlines that travel there, and the UK departure airports that fly to these airports.

I hope it’s useful because it took me ages to pull the information together, and although even now I wouldn’t like to guarantee that I’ve included every possible flight path it should come pretty close. But if you know of an airline or route I’ve missed, or have an airstrip in your garden where biplanes from Kent occasionally parachute in budget travellers just let me know and I’ll get it added.