I’ve found skyscanner.net‘s flight search tools to be incredibly powerful and helpful. In this post I’ll describe a few of those features, and a few limitations of the engine.
Broad Searches and Clear Results
Say I want to visit Bulgaria sometime in August, but my plans are no more specific than that. Skyscanner makes it very easy to find out what would be the fastest and cheapest way to get there. As you can see above, my search need be no more specific than stating an arrival country, a destination country, and a month. (Actually, you can change the destination to “anywhere” and the date to “all year”, so it needn’t even be that specific.) This gives you a list of possible arrival and departure aiports, and eventually a very lucid graph something like the following:
It couldn’t be easier to see when the trip will be least costly. Clicking through will eventually take you to the airline’s website, where you can book flights.
Flight Map
I’m a big fan of maps, as regular readers will know. Skyscanner uses maps to great effect:
This is Skyscanner’s cheap flights map. By clicking on one airport (here, Frankfurt) I am able to see where I can fly to from that airport. Green indicates a direct route, and yellow an indirect route. Clock on a second destination and you can summon up prices and schedules for the route. This is very useful if you want to know at a glance where you can fly to from your local airport.
Multiple Bookings
Another neat feature is Skyscanner’s ability to tell you if the cheapest route between your two cities involves booking two separate flights. For example, if I want to fly from London to L’viv, I might be told that the cheapest way is to book a flight to Venice, and then a second flight from there to L’viv.
Limitations
Firstly, this system seems to work best for routes where flying round trip is equivalent to booking two one-way tickets. I tried a few transatlantic routes and didn’t seem to be able to get deals as good as those you might find on Opodo.
Secondly, you should be wary of the first round of prices the site shows you. As I understand it, these are stored up from previous searches of the same route. As such, they are often a few days out of date and the final price will often be slightly higher. I found the site to be particularly bad at estimating Ryanair prices. Nevertheless, it almost always gives a reliable indicator of which dates will be the cheapest to fly on.
Anybody else notice features and/or limitations of the site that I’ve missed?
