Over 20 million of us in the UK use the internet to research our holidays every year. It can be laborious and a real time waster. Here’s some time-saving tips…
1. Don’t use Google
2. Use kayak and skyscanner first
3. Then check out the online travel agents
www.holidayreviews.info can save you big time! Its got all of these and more all in one place.
1. Don’t use Google. Using Google is a big mistake – its the wrong place to start – too many irrelevant results – you need more focus. Sorry Mr. Google
2. Use kayak and skyscanner first
I would also have recommended sidestep but as of Dec’07 they are merging with kayak but are to keep their brand name.
Both kayak and skyscanner are true search engines and have excellent tools to help you get the best deals including when its cheapest to fly and should I buy now or wait?
3. Then check out the online travel agents
One of the most popular places to look for cheap flights is
Expedia.co.uk is a great site and has 10% of the visit market in the UK but it’s not the best place to search for airfares. Why? – because it doesn’t use the budget carriers EasyJet or Ryanair, or any charter flights.
Opodo, Lastminute and Ebookers are popular too but they’re not search engines. They’ll find you a flight but it won’t necessarily be cheapest.
Cheapflights.co.uk is one of the 10 most visited travel sites in the UK and promotes itself as a “Price comparison for cheap flights & travel”. Actually it really only provides a series of links to partner sites such as flydeals , ebookers, and hot4holidays . To compare fares, you need to click on each “partner” link individually and wait as it opens on a new page – so all in all not the best.
Travelsupermarket.co.uk is a better site. It searches the pages of other sites to find the best deals and includes the no-frills and charter flights but only flights departing from UK but again its not perfect.
So how do you know whether a comparison site is checking every available flight? Simply - you don’t. So it pays to check fares at two or three.
How much could I save?….Well I checked out return flights from Heathrow to Naples going out on 1st April ’08 returning on the 8th.
Expedia tempted me with £131 for the return trip but when I clicked the “Choose this flight” I got a bit of a shock when I got the message saying “We're sorry, the price of this flight has changed from £130.79 to £443.94”! and it had stop-overs in Rome on the way out and Milan on the way back! So - sod that!
Travelsupermarket confirmed £122.50 using ebookers flying Alitalia with a couple of hours stop-over in Rome both ways – not too bad.
Skyscanner had me salivating a £113 return with a direct flight out and just one stop over in Hamburg on the way back. Sadly, when it checked the final leg from Hamburg to Heathrow it was no longer available (anyhow it didn’t actually land in Heathrow until Wednesday morning) – close but definitely no cigar.
Kayak showed me a direct flight using Easyjet for £144. So I clicked through to the Easyjet site and took off the automatically included insurance and could book for £143.
So, in this case, if money was tight and I didn’t mind the stop-overs Travelsupermarket came up with the best deal but this time Easyjet via kayak would be the one I would choose.
As ever - it pays to shop around!
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Sure, don't use Google, as all it would throw is a bunch of random results. But, if you want to find out which budget airline flies from a particular airport or to a particular destination, you can use WhichBudget (www.whichbudget.com). It does not display prices which end up being out-of-date anyways, but instead it has only relevant results: which budget airline flies from ... to ...!
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