Should you go direct with the airline or use price comparison? Are scheduled flights more expensive than low cost when you add in all the options? Our How to book a flight guide shows you the answers.
When going on holiday outside of the UK, you could get a ferry or Eurostar – and while they are great for getting over the Channel and allowing you the freedom to travel around the Continent, that really is about their limit.
Of course, the best choice to flee Blighty when it comes to the sheer amount of options is to fly. Those living in the south of the country and blessed with a wide range of options thanks to Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton, Stansted and a number of regional airports, but the north is increasingly catching up.
From Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh airports, you can now fly pretty much anywhere in the world, and again there are a number of regional airports offering flights to the best holiday resorts in Europe – Leeds-Bradford is a particularly good one as it’s the main base of low-cost airline Jet2 which has an extensive European network.
With all the options on offer though, how do you go about getting the best deal? Well there are several ways of booking one and we’ll look at the pros and cons of each.
Using a travel agent
The traditional way of booking a holiday looked like it was going out of style a couple of years ago, with more and more people predicting there would be a shift towards internet bookings – while this has happened, the high-street travel agent refuses to lie down and die and in fact, is a growing method of selling holidays for some companies. Virgin Holidays for instance has opened a number of shops at popular supermarkets and shops such as Tesco, Debenhams, House of Fraser and Sainsbury’s.
Travel agents will use industry computer systems to search for holidays or flights on your desired dates – and they will take a commission from the companies you book with. What they do sell is expertise – they are specialists and will have travelled to many of the destinations they sell, so will be able to tell you whether it’s the kind of place you might like or not.
However, travel agents are usually more geared towards selling package holidays – while they will be able to do flight-only deals, they might not offer the same expertise in flight search as they do in holiday search.
There is also a danger that they will try to push you towards using a company that gives them the best commission or has sales target bonuses, rather than finding the best deal for you.
You can also try on-line travel agents such as the following:
Click here to book with Ebookers
Click here to book with Expedia
Click here to book with lastminute.com
Use a price-comparison site
More often than not, when booking a flight only, we already know where we want to go, so using a travel agent’s expertise is not really needed, meaning you’re likely to find the best deals online.
Price comparison sites are a great way of checking the prices of a lot of airlines at the same time – and the most clever ones will give you a number of options when searching. For instance, if you want to go to Las Vegas, it might be cheaper to fly there on a one-stop trip, where you fly into what is known as a ‘hub’ airport in America and then catch a connecting flight, rather than flying direct.
The problem with price-comparison sites is that they may not offer every single airline, indeed some of them might miss out the low-cost airlines. Why? Well again, price-comparison sites get a commission when you book and low-cost airlines tend not offer commissions to people – whether travel agents or internet sites.
Our recommended price comparison site is Skyscanner. It has more than 1,000 airlines on board, offers really flexible searches (you can search flights to a destination over a whole year if you really want to get the lowest price and don’t mind when you go).
Click here to search flights with Skyscanner
Book direct with the airline
It used to be that you could get a better price almost anywhere else than directly with the airline. They used to offer discounted flights to travel agents and tour operators who could sell them on to the public and even undercut the airline themselves if they wanted to lower their margins.
That all came to a juddering halt though when easyJet and RyanAir, ahem, took off and insisted the cheapest fares could only be booked with them – and the rest of the airlines followed suit. So if you know where you are going and there are only one or two airlines that fly there, you can do your own price comparison.
Here are some links to airline booking sites
Click here to book with Aer Lingus
Click here to book with British Airways
Click here to book with Cathay Pacific
Click here to book with Etihad
Click here to book with Jet2
Click here to book with Lufthansa
Click here to book with Singapore Airlines
Click here to book with Swiss International Airlines
Click here to book with Virgin Atlantic
Tips for getting the best deal
Book ahead: Fares on scheduled and low-cost airlines increase as seat fill up so tend to be cheaper when you buy them months ahead – but fares can drop if a flight is not selling well. Most airlines tend to publish fares around five months in advance but some may do up to a year. Register with various airlines for email alerts, so you know when new routes and offers come up.
Fly off-peak: Obviously, there are times when flights are more expensive – major holidays, half-term and over the summer for instance – so try and fly out of these times. But also look at the time of day – especially with the low-cost airlines, the red-eye flights early in the morning or late at night are cheaper. You could be making a false economy though if you land at an airport past midnight and there are no public transport options meaning you have to take an expensive cab.
Book a package: It can be cheaper if you book your flight and hotel together, rather than doing them separately. This also then constitutes a ‘package holiday’ meaning you will be better protected if anything goes wrong.
Fly with different airlines (or in and out of different airports): You can sometimes get a better deal – especially with low-cost airlines – if you book to fly out with one and back with a different one. You can also do the same with airlines that code share* or are part of the same airlines alliances such as One World (BA, American, Cathay Pacific, Qantas, Iberia, Finnair, Royal Jordanian and LanChile) or Star Alliance (27 airlines, including Singapore, Lufthansa, Swiss, United, Air Canada and Air New Zealand).
* Code sharing is when a number of airlines will fly the same route and split the departure slots
Check the airport options: Many cities have several airports so it pays to check who flies into which airport and see if you can get a better deal. We recently got the best price to fly to New York by combining this with the tip above. It was £200 cheaper to fly into JFK with British Airways and then fly back with its alliance partner American from Newark airport, rather than flying return with either airline.
Think about the extras: So many airlines charge so much for extras these days that you need to take them into account in more ways than one. Yes, it’s always cheaper to strip everything out of a flight – but if you then end up spending £30 on board for food and drink, you could end up, again, making a false economy.
