To ask seasoned travellers for their top tips for getting cheap flights

[Tenegrief]

Posting here for traffic.

After much agonising and deliberation, we have finally booked a villa for our family holiday this year. Now I've moved on to the flight booking... We don't have many options (thank goodness, otherwise I'd be back to agonising again!) but I'm keen to get the best deal possible.

We're going in October and I'm pretty sure we'll be flying Ryanair or Easyjet (probably the former) - is it worth waiting for a sale/offer (if such things exist), or should I just get them booked ASAP?

Thanks.

Book them as soon as you can. Clear your internet history/cookies before you book if you've been browsing different options.
To be honest, the cheapest seats for October have probably already gone as those flights have been on sale a while but if you can be at all flexible you may be able to get a good deal.

Book now. They only get more expensive.

For future reference, the best time to get the cheapest flights is to book when she fares are first released.

Incidentally, EJ is far better than RA.

Clear your cookies when pricing things up or you find the price steadily goes up.

Boom as soon as the flights become available and be flexible with your dates and times.

Try Skyscanner and search by month. Not all the budget airlines are on it but it's worth looking to see.

It should give you at least an idea of the best days to fly.

Never wait on flights to get cheaper. The algorithms are deliberately set to check your cookies so prices rise and pressure sell to you/ understand you are going to fly that route and fleece you more.

Hence why you should clear cookies.

Now you've all said it, I think I remember someone telling me to clear cookies when browsing flights. I'll give that a go.

And I'll definitely get them booked ASAP, thanks to your advice.

Unfortunately we can't be flexible on dates (we picked them because it seemed like the cheapest option for us for flights (I work in a school so am bound by holiday dates, although I'm part time so we're able to overlap term dates a bit) and the villa is now booked and paid for).

I agree about EJ being far better than RA (after one particularly ridiculous experience with RA, I swore I'd never fly with them again...) but it looks like RA is much cheaper (by about £300). I'm going to look at this more closely, though, because of things like baggage allowance.

Thanks all!

For ryanair flights we got the best value by putting through one booking with an adult on their own with a 20kg bag, and then the rest of us on another booking with absolutely no extras. Much cheaper than the family bags and seats deal they push on you.

I flew to Malaga last month with Ryan air and was impressed.

Use Google flights or Skyscanner to check options.

There aren’t really any tricks if you are bound by certain dates and booked accommodation.

Just go for the Ryanair option and make sure you have cabin compliant luggage.

Can you go from a different airport a little further afield? Will cost more in petrol but still might be some savings to be had

Flights do go down sometimes but I've never seen a pattern. I fly with Ryanair a lot and have always had a good experience. Just make sure your luggage is the right size/weight!

Book now. Flights go up and you miss out. There's no such thing as cheap flights either anymore.

Tbh my experience with Ryanair and whether it's a good / bad experience tends to be based on the destination rather than the airline itself.

Basically are the rest of the passengers going for a rowdy piss up on the beach or city break or are they going for other reasons.

Strict enforcement of stuff like baggage allowance tends to follow to the idiocy level of the flight.

Sad but true.

RA charge for hand luggage these days so check that by the time you’d added luggage on that they are still cheaper!

The single biggest thing you can do to get cheap flights is to avoid travelling at peak times. That’s when airlines know that demand for seats will far exceed supply, so they can charge more. A flight to Malaga on the third Saturday in July will cost several times the price of a flight to the same airport on a Tuesday in March.

If you do want to travel at any sort of peak period, or school holidays, Christmas, Easter, Bank Holidays or around major events, sporting fixtures, cultural events etc etc, book as early as possible. The price will only increase. Be flexible with your travel dates & days if possible. Midweek will generally be cheaper than weekends. Inconvenient flight times will usually be cheaper.
Most airlines run their biggest promotional ‘seat sale’ of the year in January, and many also run promotions in September to generate demand for flights in winter.
Minimise the number of ‘ancillaries’ eg bags, meals, insurance, seat allocations etc etc you book alongside your basic flights. Shop around & use price comparison sites for those.

Learn to pack less and pack better. Roll not fold.

If you live near a local authority with different school holidays, that might help eg we sometimes fly from Scotland in mid August, when Scottish pupils are back at school

With Ryanair, it's cheapest to book your luggage at the time of booking. Its extortionate to put on later.

If you need a lot of luggage consider looking away from the budget options. We flew Swiss at Christmas for less than the corresponding easyjet fare by the time all the luggage was added because their standard fare includes hold bag, cabin bag and a laptop/handbag.

Pretty much this

Sign up for email alerts to any airline you might travel with. Note when seasonal flights are released. (Easyjet for Christmas for example were released a month or so back)
Check and track price changes on Google Flights and Skyscanner.

If you're not tied to dates/destinations then also look as near to the date as you dare. In those cases, you often do find they go down as they try and fill a flight. Last summer I paid £70 for a one way Ryanair flight a couple of months in advance, to see that the week before it was slashed to £12. That said, my daughter has just flown home for Easter and BA was cheaper than any of the low costs.

You really do just have to keep having a look.

Thanks everyone.
I don't think I'd have the nerve to wait until we're about to go, @So1invictus - we're absolutely tied to destination and dates so we'd be stuffed if they didn't come down. We're already looking at about 1300-1400 for all of us just for the flights and a bit of luggage.

I've looked at other, less traditionally budget, options and they are way more money. Oddly, I just looked at package holidays for our destination and we can get a cheap 2* deal including flights for only about £100 more than just the Ryanair flights! We're considering doing this and having another place to stay on the island!

Momondo.

Every time.

They do predictions of when your flight price will drop/rise.

By following their advice, I managed to book a peak early August holiday flight to Thailand in July. Had I booked Apr-June, I'd have paid £350 more pp. Momondo saved me over £1k.

Couldn't believe it when all 3 of us were then upgraded to business class at the gate. £450 return to Thailand, 1 way business, was a pretty decent price for me.

Well, our approach is always to start with cheap flights, not fixed accommodation!

We pick wherever skyscanner points us to on the dates we can do, check that there's reasonable accommodation options, and just go with wheres available.

Been to loads of great places this way that we'd never have thought of. Cheapest was £120 for return flights for two and a lakefront self catered apartment in Macedonia. For a week.

We were fairly limited with our choices for a variety of reasons this time, but I definitely would like to give your strategy a go in the future, @thecatsthecats

Accommodation was really important to us for this break so we wanted to make sure we could get what we wanted first before booking flights. Done now, anyway (and we could cancel the villa anyway until really close to our dates, so we've got that fall back on if need be).