Researching and booking your flights has become so much easier in the last 15 years I have been travelling the world, and thanks to the internet the potential traveller is now spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing who to book their flights with.
The travel industry can be very temperamental when it comes to booking flights, especially with wildly fluctuating prices and peak time price hikes. Thankfully there are also a ton of little tips, tricks and travel hacks to save you a lot of money too.
Here are a list of some of the best online resources for booking your flights.
One of my perennial favourite sites, and also the one I booked my very first flight with all those years ago! This is an awesome company for those under 26 or students, and they often have discounts for those groups. They can still offer good airfare rates for anyone older than that too though.
A fantastic site for choosing both flights or hotel deals. A Canadian company, they have a range of deals covering every major destination, and even have guides on site to help you get the best deals.
This is a great option with a huge database of airlines and flight brokers to search through and help you find the best deals. Like STA travel they have a US site and a UK site, so which one you use would obviously depend on where you wanted to leave from.
One of the best agregates out there and one of my absolute must use websites, Skyscanner has a huge list of airlines that it searches through, including a lot of budget carriers. This site should be one of your starting points in your price comparison research. What I love about Skyscanner is that it is such an enabler of spontaneous travel, as you can put in your home airport, click some rough dates you want to travel, and it will show you every flight all over the world based on price! Great if you want to travel but don’t know where.
A great engine that is perfect for searching out budget flight deals for both short haul and international flights and like most aggregates they also have hotel and car deals too. I have been using this site more and more lately.
A relative newcomer to the game but it has come out punching! Google Flights has quickly become one of the best flight search engines around. You can enter your departure airport and see where the best deals all over the world are. The one major drawback is that as of the time of writing you still can’t book direct from them (c’mon, sort it out Google!) But it is still a great research tool with a fantastic visual interface.
Did you enjoy this article? What are your favourite apps when travelling? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below or on my Facebook or Twitter pages and please feel free to share it with any or all of the social media buttons. If you want to get more great backpacking tips, advice and inspiration, please subscribe to updates via email in the box to your right.
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Michael Huxley is a published author, freelance travel writer and founder of Bemused Backpacker. He is also a charge nurse by vocation with an interest in emergency nursing and travel medicine, but his real passion is travel. Since finding his wanderlust a decade ago in South East Asia, he has bounced from one end of the planet to another and has no intention of slowing down.
Thanks! Good list of resources. I recently used Cheapoair to book a flight to Copenhagen.
Nice, thanks for the addition!
Thank you for posting this! Very helpful.
You are more than welcome. 🙂