Does this kind of flight booking website exist?

BenEadir

Hi all,

I'd like to organise a few cheap and cheerful weekends away with the family i.e. two adults and two children aged 9 and 13 based on cheap return flights. I don't mind where we go (it's more about being away and having a bit of an adventure together) but I do want to fly from Dublin and don't want to spend more than 3 or absolute max 4 hours in the air which means anything from Iceland to Norway to France/Italy/Spain etc

What I'd like to do is nominate the weekends well in advance, check out the cheapest flights going and then organise accommodation etc but the problem I have is the only way I know how to do this at the moment is to select each possible destination and see what the prices are which mean doing an awful lot of searching on skyscanner.ie and separately on the low cost airlines i.e. Ryanair.

Is there a website which alows you to put in your departure airport, specify the max length of flight you want to take, enter your departure and return dates/time and it will return results which you can rank by price or am I just dreaming that such a website exists and I have no choice but to trawl through all the various potential destinations one by one?

Ben

Eponymous

You can leave the destination blank on skyscanner and just enter departure point, dates and number travelling. It will give you a list of countries and the price per person to them.

Once you select the country, then it'll give you a breakdown of destinations within that one, sorted by price.

Hope that helps.

BenEadir

Eponymous wrote: »

You can leave the destination blank on skyscanner and just enter departure point, dates and number travelling. It will give you a list of countries and the price per person to them.

Once you select the country, then it'll give you a breakdown of destinations within that one, sorted by price.

Hope that helps.

That's deadly Eponymous and it includes Ryanair!!!

Cheers,

Ben

Gatica

I also recently found out you can select a whole calendar month for return flights in skyscanner. If you're flexible with your travel dates, it would be really useful I think.

BenEadir

I wonder if yu guys can help me with this. I'm trying out the Flightscanner site to see if there are cheap weekend return flights anywhere this weekend. I'm inputting tomorrow as the departure date, Sunday as the return, leaving the destination blank and confirming 3 adults and one child under 12. The initial search comes back and the Norway flights starting at €141 look appealing. I click on that option which brings up a second screen with all the price options including the lowest €141 flights which I click on but when the site goes to fetch details of those flights it then comes back with flights which are €297 per person not the €141 originally indicated

I thought this might just be a glitch with these particular Norway flights but I tried 3 or 4 other flights and each time the initially indicated low price never appears, the end result is always a much higher costing flight is offered.

Am I doing something really stupid???

Here are the three screen shots showing the initial €141 flight on offer, the same €141 flight listed when all Norway flights are listed and then, having clicked the €141 option the screen I get offering the €297 flights with no sign of the originally indicated €141 flights.

Screen #1



Screen #2



Screen #3


Help??

Ben

Gatica

I tried your search options in skyscanner and I get the same results. All I'm thinking is there must be some kind of bug on their system. You'll notice that it lists 2 airlines when it shows the 141 price, so I'd say the cheaper price must be by the missing second airline, Norwegian.
Why it doesn't show it in the results, I don't know. I also checked the other destinations and got the misquoted results you mention.

I just checked the norwegian.com website, Dublin - Oslo All Airports for your selected dates and there's a cheaper flight there for 181 Euro.
http://www.norwegian.com/en/flight/select-flight/?D_City=DUB&A_City=OSLALL&TripType=2&D_Day=28&D_Month=201402&R_Day=02&R_Month=201403&AdultCount=1&ChildCount=0&InfantCount=0
Unfortunately, not the 141 Skyscanner is quoting.

arch_stanton

I've seen this a lot in the past. I think it's because Skyscanner doesn't check the prices in detail until you select a particular flight.

You can see at the end of your first screenshot that it says "Prices found by users in the last 15 days".

When you go into the specific flight it's got "Prices checked daily............."

Stinicker

If you are so tight on the budget then you should automatically exclude Norway from your list. It is probably the most expensive country on earth, €20 - €25 for a simple McDonalds, €200 for dinner for two in an average restaurant is not unheard of and €10 pints so what you'll save on the flights you will spend quite easily in the rip-off Norwegian tourist market.

Iceland would give better value but with more limited options.

redeog

my favourite feature on skyscanner is instead of selecting an exact date you can select to search a whole month and it will give you a chart of which day its cheapest to fly from.

If you aren't tied down to exact dates then you can get some super deals on it.

BenEadir

Thanks all, I'm not hung up on Norway or anywhere in particular nor am I restricted by dates. I just want to figure out how to get the max value for money from Skyscanner and similar sites so that we (wife, 2 kids and myself) can have the weekend bags packed and pick up a last minute weekend adventure somewhere.

Totally get your point Stinicker ref Norway. It's the total cost of the weekend which I'll have an eye on so it's flights + accommodation + food/spending. Happy to spend a bit more on flights if the accommodation and food etc will be less expensive and vice versa.

It's more about the family time together on an unplanned adventure rather than anything else.

I guess the best thing to do is check these sort of aggregator sites early Friday mornings and if something amazing is available e.g. €50 return PP to Barcelona or Rome etc then grab them and figure the rest out afterwards

Thanks for the help guys. I'm glad I'm not going mad or being a complete thicko in the way I was using Skyscanner though!!

Ben