5 flight booking myths busted from deleting cookies to booking direct

Booking flights can be extremely stressful as, for most of us, the way airlines price their flights is a complete mystery.

There are frequent rumours that internet cookies save your searches and then allow airlines to hike the price. 

There are also conflicting claims about the best way to get the cheapest deal: should you go direct or use a comparison tool to get you the very best deal?

So what’s fact and what’s fiction? We have busted five of the most common flight booking myths.

Jetting off: Get the best price by searching several comparison sites

1) A search engine will compare ALL prices
There are hundreds of search tools out there now claiming to do the hard work of comparing flights or holiday prices for you.

As a comparison tool we expect them to search the whole of the web, and presume that means we need only to check one to get the very best price.

However some may miss certain deals, list them incorrectly or their software may work slightly differently.

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According to analysis of 60 different flight routes from London, Manchester and Birmingham by Cheapflightsfinder.com, using a single comparison tool isn’t enough.

Its tool allows you to plug in your criteria and search across several comparison tools at once – a useful shortcut to ensure you get the very great review best socks5 proxy server providers post price.  

It found that Skyscanner’s search tool was the most likely to discover the cheapest flights. 

Skyscanner revealed the cheapest flight 40 per cent of the time.

Momondo revealed the cheapest flight 38 per cent of the time.

Kayak revealed the cheapest flight 36 per cent of the time.

Jetcost revealed the cheapest flight 13 per cent of the time.

Cheapflights and Dohop revealed the cheapest flight 35 per cent of the time. 

Google flights revealed the cheapest flight 18 per cent of the time.

This is Money tested this out ourselves across Cheapflights.co.uk, Google, Dehop, Skyscanner, Kayak and Momondo.

On a return flight from London to Rome in June next year. Dehop offered the cheapest price at £63 compared to Momondo at £73 for exactly the same Ryanair flights – a difference of £9.

It was a similar story when flying from London to Colombo in Sri Lanka with the same Sri Lankan Airlines flight costing £570 via Google compared to £513 through Momondo, Cheapflights and Kayak.

We also found that while most of the comparison tools showed the same flight as the cheapest, just with differing prices, some included other airlines that came out cheaper still.   

2) Go direct to get the best deal
It’s often presumed that just as some hotels offer cheaper deals when you call them direct, airlines advertise cheaper prices on their own sites than shown via a search tool.

However according to Cheapflightsfinder.com this isn’t actually the case as often travel agents buy in bulk and can therefore offer a cheaper price.

A quick tip, most airlines will appear on price comparison sites these days, but there may be a couple that don’t such as American Airlines and Southwest Airlines.

Cheapflightsfinder.com’s chief executive Shahab Siddiqu says: ‘One way we recommend achieving peace of mind is by comparing your options on multiple flight comparison sites.

‘This method greatly increases your booking options and where you decide to spend your hard-earned cash.’

Plugging in an a few example flights we found that going through a comparison tool got a better deal, although not by an enormous amount.  We checked a few destinations from UK airports in June next year. 

There was a difference of £43 on the same Emirates flight from Manchester to Sydney booked through Skyscanner compared to going direct.

A return trip to Cairo with BA came out £15 cheaper through Kayak and Cheapflights.

A flight from Bristol to Marakesh with EasyJet cost £30 more through its own website than Momondo and Kayak.  

Dream destinations: Error fare websites claim to highlight impossibly low flight prices caused by human error or computer glitches

3) Error fares are as rare as hen’s teeth
Airline glitches, human error and flash sales see a lucky few holidaymakers nabbing impossibly cheap air fares to dream destinations – not something most travellers hold out for. 

There are some companies that promise to ferret out these super cheap deals for you delivered to your inbox, or set up pricing alerts for a fee.

But according to Cheapflightsfinder.com data they are actually easier to come by than most people think, if you use a few clever tactics.