How to find the cheapest flights

Here’s my secret: four websites and a human

Dear friends

If you plan to fly across borders any time soon then you will, I hope, find this short note useful. Over the decade I’ve spent booking international flights almost monthly (bar pandemic months, of course), there are a few websites that I’ve come to know and trust when it comes to finding deals for flights – and so, seeing as I’m in the depths of making travel plans today, I thought I’d share the following resources with you:

Jack’s Flight Club

If you’re based in the UK, Europe or the USA, then this site is your ticket to brilliant deals on airfares. Jack (yes, he’s a real person) used to spend all his time scouring the internet for cheap flights – and now he has a team (and algorithms) who do that too. Every week JFC sends out an email with a round-up of the latest exceptional deals on flights; if you subscribe (it’s just over £3 per month) you’ll be notified of special offers as soon as they pop up.

Google Flights

Your travel dates are flexible? Come to this site first. What I really appreciate is that once you’ve selected your origin and destination, you click on the date box and the current month and following month appear simultaneously, showing the lowest price of a flight on each day. (Sometimes the prices are a bit slow to show up – just hang in there.) Good to know, right? Here’s how I use it: once I’ve chosen my dates based on price, I click around to find out what airline it’s with, and then go directly to that airline’s website. The best deals shown here are often offered by third-party sites like Expedia and TravelWings, but I’m hesitant to use them these days because if there’s a problem with your flight (hello, Covid), getting a refund or changing your dates can be near-impossible.

Skyscanner

This site is also great for price comparisons. Like Google Flights, it has that convenient cheapest-flight-by-date feature and – this is pretty handy – you can set an alert and receive emails when prices on your selected dates change.

Travelstart

Travelstart is not as convenient for price comparisons as the two sites I’ve already mentioned, but I pop on to this site anyway because it covers more airlines that operate in Southern Africa.

A travel agent

It was only after Covid struck that I, quite by accident, ended up booking a flight through a travel agent. And you know what? She was brilliant. After 10 years of relying on myself (and spending who knows how many hours searching and comparing the prices of flights), it was actually pretty wonderful to have someone do that work for me. What I really appreciated is that when the flight was cancelled and needed to be rebooked, it was the agent who dealt with all of that, not me.

I do, however, find it hard to let go of making travel plans and so this is how I now operate: I scout around for deals and dates and, once I’ve found what I consider the best dates to fly, I drop the agent a line and tell her exactly what I’m looking for, as well as the price I’ve found, and ask if she can beat that. So far, it’s working well.

What websites or apps do you use to find good deals on flights? Please drop a comment below if there’s something you think I should know about.

With love,

Narina

PS I’ve done some reading around, and I’m still not sure whether there’s any truth to the fact that airlines track your browsing history and push the price up if they detect you’ve been searching specific routes. Sometimes I search incognito (Ctrl-Shift-N), sometimes I don’t. I’m not sure there’s a big difference.