Cheap Flights - best ways to locate/compare?

[Earlybird]

Need to research flight info for a cheap flight roundtrip London - Frankfurt in the spring. I've never flown with Easyjet, Ryanair or any of the other budget airlines. What's the best way to find out schedules and compare prices, or do I need to visit individual airline websites?

Sadly you need to go to each website individually as the cheap and nasties don't pay commission to anyone and so aren't listed on other websites/with travel agents. It's worthwhile checking out the regular airlines too as sometimes they have good deals, although probably less so for Frankfurt as it's a busy business route. Travelocity is good for sheduled airlines.

Also, a word of warning about airports, Ryanair fly to Hahn which is miles and miles from Franfurt, and I expect any other cheap airline would do the same. Plus I know someone who got caught out with a luggage problem with Ryanair, apparently on their terms and conditions they don't guarantee that your checked luggage will travel on the same flight as you, and if it doesn't it's your responsibility to go to the airport and pick it up when it does arrive.

Try www.kelkoo.co.uk - thats what we used

Here

The best sites (we use them all the time are:-

skyscanner aand travel jungle

They both look at multiple websites to get the cheapest prices for flights and then link you through to the site so you can book online.

Sky Scanner also has a fantastic Month to View facility so you can figure out which days are cheapest to fly out and return to maximise the discounts. Only disadvantage is that prices are not real time so sometime when you click through to the relevant site, you can't get that price anymore. It is also only usable for flights in Europe.

Travel Jungle is fantastic because it looks at heaps of website for you and brings back the best prices, saves you having to trawl through them all yourself. It covers the whole world and also allows for one way flights too. The only warning is that it is heavily sponsored by ebookers which means that their prices ALWAYS come up first whether they are the cheapest or not. All it take sis to scroll down the page a bit to check for better prices.

We use these sites all the time and find them fantastic. Happy flying.

What I do is I use a website that compares the prices, then I go to the airlines website directly and find it is always cheaper. Do the research on where the airport is, like bran says. Ryanair's airport for Amsterdam is 90 minutes away, easyjets is 20(Ithink) and considering the flight is only 40 minutes, why spend twice as long reaching the city?!