9
votes
How do you find flights?
Planes may soon be a thing of the past, for now they're still sometimes hard to replace.
I used to rely on Hipmunk for finding flights, but sadly, they recently shut down. So I was wondering, what do people on tildes use to find flights? Any tool/website you're happy with?
Thanks, it does look decent!
I'll second SkyScanner, which I've used for many years, as well as Google Flights which runs on the the venerable ITA Matrix but is a lot more convenient for all but the most specific of queries.
I've found that Google and SkyScanner do differ on occasion, and they seem to be providing some genuine healthy competition to each other; I don't recall ever seeing an offer elsewhere that wasn't matched or beaten by one of the two.
Anecdotally, SkyScanner tends to win out for me overall (to the tune of several hundred GBP on my first booking this year), but there was a period from about mid 2018 - late 2019 where Google was consistently beating them on the itineraries I needed.
I also tend to use the British Airways search tool if I need to do a booking with points, as it tends to give the most comprehensive view for OneWorld member airlines, and those are the easiest to transfer into from my credit card.
I second Google Flights for aggregation, but one downside is that it does not show prices for Southwest. Not really a concern for OP since they're from Paris though.
Usually a combination of SkyScanner, Google Flights, and my credit card's booking portal.
One thing to note when using SkyScanner, and any service that either is or aggregates third-party booking services, is when you find a good deal try to find and book it directly on the airline/hotel website. It will save you a lot of headache and give you some confidence that it was booked correctly. If it's more expensive on the first-party site, at least confirm the flight/room is still available before using the third-party.
For example, recently, I tried to book a round trip ticket (from A to B, then B to A) on Jetstar using one of the SkyScanner listings. The booking service said everything was good at checkout and in the confirmation email, but I only got a followup with ticket info for A to B. Checked with Jetstar directly using the reference code and they only had a one-way booked, no record of a round trip, and the return flight the booking service said I had was already full. The booking service then had the audacity to try and charge me a $50 cancellation fee. After this, I did some more research and found that this sort of thing isn't that uncommon.
This is a very limited-scope answer: I just always use JetBlue if possible and then suffer from there. JetBlue is almost always to always the cheapest flights for me, they have complementary wifi and pretty comfortable planes, the employees have always seemed to be the happiest there (not always the most polite or best at their job, they're still humans, but they don't seem to be doing the super-fake-customer-service-happy and nice, but actually genuinely like their jobs), and they pledged to be carbon neutral for all domestic flights by July of 2020.
Doesn't work for me as I'm based in France :)
I work for a travel company, so I have to go through their site to take advantage of a yearly travel benefit.