Save money researching low-cost flights in the RIGHT WAY!
The way you search can SIGNIFICANTLY change the price you see for exactly the same flights. If you want to know how to fly cheaper with low-cost airlines, keep reading.
There is one thing that is a common knowledge for any traveller: Google Flights and other aggregators (like Skyscanner, Kayak, etc) saves us a lot of time. Those websites compare the prices of dozens, sometimes hundreds of airlines in a matter of seconds.
However people would be surprised with what they don´t do (at least not very efficiently) and the opportunities to save considerable money they waste. Especially when flying with low-cost airlines.
A good part of the low-cost carriers, (like RyanAir, Wizzair, EasyJet, etc) operates in a system called “point-to-point” network, differently than legacy carriers (those that are not low cost) like Lufthansa, Emirates, British Airways and many others that operate in a Hub and spoke network. That means that low-cost comapnies in general sell a ticket to fly from a city to another without any stop in between, while legacy (or national) carriers have stops called hubs (like Lufthansa have in Frankfurt or Emirates in Dubai).
How that can help you save money and why is this related to Google Flights and other aggregators?
The answer is in how you look for a ticket price in the internet. Most people will simply search for the price of the tickets from the place where they are departing to where they are arriving.
Therefore, if you are planning to travel from Warsaw to New York, you can enter in Kayak or Google Flights and look for flights departing from WAW airport to JFK (for example). It will show to you a lot of options, and currently a round trip between those two cities would cost around 430 euros the cheapest option, with one or two stops in the way.
However, right now, it is possible to go from Warsaw to JFK for 285 euros. But Google Flights and most agreggators will not show me that.
Why?
The answer is simple: Those websites don’t work very well with low-cost airlines.
In the case mentioned above, the cheapest way would be to fly to Norway with two of the low-cost carriers that do the route from Warsaw to Oslo. From them take another low-cost flight to New York.
Google will not show you that because those airlines work in a point to point system, as I mentioned above, remember? They are not optimized to sell flights with a stop in the way. But if yourself create this stop by purchasing two separate tickets, you can find much better prices.
The best way to find those low-cost opportunities is to look for flights separately. When I want to travel from Poland to Brazil to visit my family, I don’t look for flights departing only from Warsaw, but also from Barcelona, Milan, London, Frankfurt, etc. So if there is a very inexpensive flight departing from one of those airports, I can also look for a low-cost flight from Warsaw to those cities and from there to Brazil. In this way, you will perform a low-cost hack to fly cheaper with low-cost airlines that even Google couldn’t find!
Just be aware that flying with low-cost carriers brings its own challenges, like the need to pay even for a cup of tea or coffee. But for those cost-savvy, it is a treasure.
Author: Levi Borba, founder of Colligere Expat Consultancy, former RM specialist for the world´s greatest airline, co-founder of Nearby Airport Hostel Warsaw and author of the book Moving Out, Living Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity.
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2 COMMENTS
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