Cheap flight tools

When flying back from Australia to the UK I spent a lot of time going through websites that helped me search for flights. I thought I’d share some of them with you, in the hope that this will help make your next flight a bit cheaper. I’m not getting referral fees for these links incidentally, these are just the tools I use when searching for the best deal.

In my experience, the best way to get cheaper fares is to book in advance and be flexible on dates. Even if you can’t book that far in advance, being able to move your dates by one or two days can really make a difference, particularly on long haul flights.

A really handy tool for searching for flights this way is skyscanner (skyscanner.net). You can see which cities are linked to each other directly and check for the cheapest days of the month to fly. It’s an international site which searches the majority of airlines as well as other flight comparison sites to find you the cheapest deals. It has a lot of options to customise your search, and is worth playing around with a bit.

If you have a budget in mind but don’t know where you want to go, or just want to spend some time fantasising about where you could be instead of where you are, Kayak have an awesome tool (Kayak.co.uk) which mashes up with Google maps to show you where you can get to from where you are and for how much. It works internationally, just choose your location and set a budget and it will show you on a map how far you can go for how much. Pretty cool.

In the UK, the low cost airlines like Easyjet and Ryanair have pretty comprehensive search tools on their websites. Some of these airlines don’t allow tools like skyscanner to index them, so it is always worth checking them out to ensure you are getting the best deal. Pretty much every low cost airline has a web presence, so check out the ones for your country.

Other websites that are worth looking at include:

Opodo – Good comparison tool for long haul flights from Europe, compares the major carriers with each other.

Flightcentre – Worldwide flight booking, claim never to be beaten on price

iwantthatflight – An Australian Flight comparison website

Zuji – Another Australian flight comparison tool, this was the one that found me the best deal on my flight from Sydney to Germany with a mere three weeks notice, naturally your mileage may vary.

There are of course lots more websites out there to compare and book flights. Lots of airlines are competing for your money these days, so the best advice I can give is to shop around and don’t be too tied up with specific dates!