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Can someone recommend a good website with flight deals from London/UK, which I could subscribe to? I mean promotions in different airlines, e.g. bmi used to have a bmifriday promotion (not sure if its still ongoing).

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I've always found flight deal website's a little dodgy. Cheapflights for instance shows travel agencies doing all these great deals £450 return to las vegas. But when you actually come to contact the company offering these deals, surprise surprise the last ticket they had just sold out 2 seconds before you called and all they have left is regular tickets. I'm not saying deals don't exist, but don't get your hopes up. If something looks too good to be true, it probably is – zeocrash Jun 22 '11 at 9:45

5 Answers

up vote 10 down vote accepted

After nearly 4 years taking many, many flights I have a method:

If you have a weekend in mind when you want to travel, head to skyscanner.net's weekend planner. It shows you the cheapest flights anywhere in the dates you choose.

Once you have a destination and a timeframe, switch to kayak.co.uk. It offers the most comprehensive search of all the websites that I've found for prices.

However, occasionally the airline will have a bonus special on their homepage that sites like kayak don't pick up, so sometimes it's worth checking out the airlines themselves.

And more recently, I've subscribed to the TravelZoo Top 20 (make sure it's the UK edition). Among their top 20 deals, which often offer incredible hotel discounts, quite regularly include amazing airline deals.

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TravelZoo seems to be exactly what I was after, cheers! I subscribed to the flight only deals. – Grzenio Jun 23 '11 at 13:39
up vote 8 down vote

I recommend, like Dan, SkyScanner, but I have a trick.

Write you location, United Kingdom, and then your destination as "EVERYWHERE". You will then see the cheapest destinations for your chosen time period. If that is "ALL YEAR" then you will see the broadest list of flight deals from the UK for the year.

I spend a lot of time searching for deals and nothing has beaten this strategy yet. As for the promotions, like BMI Friday, SkyScanner has a reliable and frequently updated feed, so it will incorporate any changes made by the host site.

Other promotional/deal opportunities include:

  1. EasyJet doing £5 off promo code - just search Google to see if there any live codes at the time of booking.
  2. Ryanair changes their fares every 3/4 days. We have been really lucky by going on their site just as midnight passes (GMT) on the date their current promotion end and being the first to buy fares on the new prices. On a ryanair note, get a Virgin Prepaid mastercard to save £10 of card fees per flight.
  3. Groupon and LivingSocial occasionally do UK flight deals
  4. Finally - and this one takes the cake for me - Subscribe to the TravelZoo newsletter - this is a fantastic tool which gives you all the weekly travel and flight promotions from the UK. We went on a trip to Malta (flights, really nice 4* hotel, breakfast and transfers included) for 4 days for £80 - offer was on TravelZoo.
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With RyanAir remember to clear your cookies/use pr0n mode. Otherwise they will charge you more for booking a flight you've looked at on a previous day. Or just don't use RyanAir, because it's an awful experience and fly to airports in the middle of nowhere. – Tom Hawtin - tackline Jun 22 '11 at 17:34
@Tom, are they seriously doing this kind of stuff with the cookies? Its truly disgusting... – Grzenio Jun 23 '11 at 13:32
TravelZoo seems to be exactly what I was after, cheers! – Grzenio Jun 23 '11 at 13:36
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@TomHawtin-tackline - that's been dispelled as a rumour only, and tested: Do Ryanair use cookies to raise the price of their tickets after you have visited the site before? – Mark Mayo Aug 29 '12 at 17:13
@MarkMayo I saw that. Whatever the case, the pricing is so secretive, it may well be worth doing anything to take another throw of the dice. – Tom Hawtin - tackline Sep 5 '12 at 13:47
up vote 3 down vote

I recommend http://www.skyscanner.net/.

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Could you specify where exactly on skyscanner I can find the information I am after? I tried to use this site many times, but it was always a waste of time sadly. – Grzenio Jun 21 '11 at 22:06

We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don't just give a one-line answer: please explain why you're recommending it as a solution. Answers that don't explain anything will be deleted. See Good Subjective, Bad Subjective for more information.
up vote 2 down vote

Bravofly has a new find a deal section which may be of use - I was signed up to their newsletter when I booked a flight through them and occasionally get some interesting things through that.

With Find a deal you have access to the over 9 million searches performed every month on our websites in order to find the best flights: all the best offers found by our users with just one click. The more general the search criteria (greater number of arrival and/or departure cities, flexibility on travel dates) the easier it will be to find a low-cost flight.

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up vote 1 down vote

I use myairdeals.com and I'm happy with it.

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We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don't just give a one-line answer: please explain why you're recommending it as a solution. Answers that don't explain anything will be deleted. See Good Subjective, Bad Subjective for more information.

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