So how do we actually search for flights? What do we go by, and what do we avoid like the plague? And what matters most to us when buying a ticket?
One thing needs to be said up front — there’s no universal manual for this. The airfare market changes, prices change, airline rules change. What worked a few years ago may not work today.
What we describe below are just the basic — and we repeat, basic — rules we follow in roughly 99 percent of cases. And it makes absolutely no difference whether we’re flying to a classic destination like Hong Kong or to a less visited country such as the Central African Republic.
Cez koho kupujeme letenky
Flight search engines like Kiwi, Skyscanner, Momondo, Google Flights and Kayak are excellent tools for getting your bearings on prices and routes. They can quickly show you the available connections and often help you find interesting flight combinations.
It has to be said, though, that they have their weak points too.
The first problem tends to be the price. It often happens that you see a very attractive figure in the search engine, but once you click through to the actual website the price is higher. There can be several reasons for this — dynamic pricing, the cheapest fare being sold out, or various service fees that only appear at the final step of the booking.
The second problem is buying through intermediaries. Many search engines don’t sell tickets directly but redirect you to online agencies. That can be a complication, especially when something goes wrong — a flight change or cancellation, for example. Communication then goes through the intermediary rather than directly with the airline, which often makes the whole process needlessly complicated.
Another drawback is flight combinations. Some sites, Kiwi in particular, put together connections from different airlines that don’t officially cooperate with each other. It can look like a good deal — a cheap flight to a transit city and another flight from there with a different company. The problem arises the moment the first flight is delayed and you miss the second one. Since the flights aren’t on the same booking, the airline bears no responsibility for it.
When buying through an aggregator, the booking itself can also be a disadvantage. Sometimes the passenger gets worse terms for changing or canceling a ticket, and add-on services such as baggage or seat selection can be more expensive than when buying directly through the airline.
And finally there’s one more practical problem. If the airline changes the flight time or cancels it altogether, the information often goes first to the agency that sold the ticket and only then to the passenger. That can needlessly draw out the whole process.
That’s also why we use search engines mainly to get an overview of the options, but buy the actual ticket directly through the airline.
Because if something does happen — a change, a canceled flight or a rescheduled connection — the airline communicates directly with us and not through an intermediary.
Just think back to the covid period, or to situations when flights were being canceled because of problems in the Persian Gulf. Many people had bought their tickets through various agencies and found themselves in an odd situation. The airline referred them to the intermediary and the intermediary referred them back to the airline. The passenger might have been outraged that it was his name on the ticket, but the airline was following the rules.
That’s why we buy our tickets directly from the carrier, and secretly hope people will be a little more cautious about all the tempting offers coming at them through Instagram and similar platforms.
How to find out which airline flies to a given destination
Another important thing many people don’t realize — not all airlines show up in the search engines.
There are around five thousand airlines in the world, but only about one thousand to twelve hundred of them operate scheduled passenger flights. The big search engines work with only some of them, so you’ll see most of the large companies in the results, but not all of them.
It’s estimated that roughly fifty to a hundred and fifty smaller airlines don’t show up in the search engines at all, or show up only to a limited extent. These are mainly smaller regional companies, some low-cost airlines, or airlines from less connected markets in Asia and Africa.
In practice that means you can sometimes see completely absurd prices or strange connections, even though a simple direct flight actually exists.
That’s exactly what happened to us in Angola. We were supposed to fly from Luanda to Cabinda. The standard search engines were throwing up insane amounts with crazy connections — from about €200 up to €1,500 for a flight of roughly an hour.
But all it took was one simple thing. We typed the airport’s name into an internet search engine and used FlightRadar to see which airlines actually fly there.
Once you find out the airline’s name, it’s usually enough to go straight to its website. The vast majority of airlines sell tickets directly through their own site.
In our case it turned out that a subsidiary of the Angolan airline TAAG didn’t show up in the search engines at all. On its website, though, you could buy a perfectly normal ticket without any nonsensical connections.
That’s another reason we use search engines mainly to get our bearings. The real solution, though, is sometimes hiding one step further on — right on the airline’s own website.
In conclusion
Don’t be fooled by the quick, “guaranteed” tips from various influencers, who are often just making money off it.
It takes a while to get the hang of some of these methods, but over time you’ll find it’s no rocket science. And above all — you can save a lot of money.
Just be a little patient, don’t look for shortcuts, and travel with your eyes open. You’ll often find that the best solution is also the simplest one.
