Cheap cheap flights. How do you find them easily?

[FM 2258]

The last couple of times I flew on Southwest Airlines using promotions I get in my email and I seem to get some very good prices. Also I have a trip to Chicago coming up and I got a relatively decent price of $219 round trip from a regional airport in Texas using Orbitz but it looked like they were pulling data from American Airlines so I just went to American and booked online there.

I'm going to the UK sometime later this year and I was wondering how do people find the dirt cheapest flights to go somewhere? When I get to the UK I plan to do some domestic flying and finding cheap flights online seems tough to do. So for you guys that love to fly alot and are able to do it for cheap, what do you use and how do you find deals?

I love to fly but for now I need to always find the cheapest. I heard of Mobissimo.com for cheap travel but they tend to leave out the budget airlines when it comes to pulling data from flights. For example I went to www.jet2.com to price a flight from London Gatwick to Manchester UK and it came out to 66 Pounds or ($120) when I did used other airlines or Mobissimo I could only get something for $175.

[hkskyline]

You can book flights on the Ryanair website (http://www.ryanair.com[/url). They often have flights for only 1 pound or less + taxes and fees. You can usually book a flight to and from Dublin for about 20 pounds or less inclusive. The downside is Ryanair flies to many obscure airports so it'll take some time and money to transfer on the ground.

[DetoX]

Yes, Ryanair seems to be the best - they start October in Poland

To London, Frankfurt, from Gdansk - about 20 Euro.

[FM 2258]

Are you guys kidding me? Wow Ryanair is CHEAP!!!!

[Jonesy55]

Yes Ryanair can be cheap, so can Easyjet (www.easyjet.com), both serve numerous European destinations out of London and other UK cities. There are some other similar smaller airlines that fly from UK provincial airports to the European mainland but these two are the best known. It's also worth checking out cheap airlines from the destination country too, GermanWings for example if you're going to Germany, many East European countries have their own similar cheap airlines.

Generally the further in advance you book a ticket the cheaper it is, avoid peak days like Friday, Saturday, Monday, if you can travel at inconvenient hours it is cheaper too.

The cheapest tickets usually work out at about £25-£30 return once you have added taxes, landing fees etc. I've been from the UK to Italy, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, France for this king of price. Don't expect any free food or drink on the plane, they charge about £5 for a sandwich, take your own!!

A good website to check prices around Europe is skyscanner (http://www.skyscanner.net/) this searches lots of airlines at the same time and shows you which days are cheapest.

If you are only going around the UK though you might want to check out the trains, we are only a small country and sometimes the extra check-in time, transfers etc makes plane travel actually take longer than the train which goes from city-centre to city-centre, plus you get to look at the countryside as you travel.

You can get a return from London to Manchester with Virgin trains from about £25, again book as far in advance as possible and choose off peak times to get the cheapest tickets. If you just turn up at the station at 08:00 and say "return to Manchester please" it could cost you £150! You can get tickets from The Trainline (www.thetrainline.com)

[Justme]

The budget airlines are great, but as mentioned there are two very important points:

1) They may not fly to the main airport, and the airport they do land on is usually much further out of town, with restrictive (and often expensive) bus connections.

2) To get the really cheap fares, you have to book well in advance. Don't expect to land in the U.K. and then book a cheap flight a few days in advance. Usually with Rynair, they mean "months" in advance to get the real deals.

One great site for "standard" airlines is www.opodo.com, sure, it's not budget, but sometimes, if you add in the convienence and lower cost of the closer airport, and with only a week to book the flight, they still work out great value. It checks 500 or so airlines and is really good.

I used Opodo to book a return flight between Frankfurt and London with only 3 days notice, and it got me one to Heathrow from Frankfurt's main terminal for £80 with BA! That was cheaper than the BA website.