While the number of low-cost airlines has proliferated in recent years, finding flights on them can still be a chore.
The truth is, most major travel search engines, such as Kayak, Sidestep, and Farechase, have a very limited selection of flights from low-cost carriers, especially the vast array of start-ups.
The good news is that some new websites have emerged, and some of the older websites have been retooled, making the task of finding cheap flights internationally a little bit easier.
The following are a few you may want to check out.
Keep in mind that these sites don’t sell tickets– you’ll have to go to the airline’s website for that.
But the good thing is that because they don’t sell tickets, they’re more neutral and objective, and won’t just show you flights because they have deals with certain airlines.
The home of OAG (which stands for Official Airline Guides) on the web, OAG.com is a very useful site in terms of discovering flights and flight information. They offer a searchable database, which answers questions like “Who Flies Where?” or “Where can I fly from here?” or even “What’s the first flight of the day from this airport?”
While OAG offers a number of products like travel itineraries and detailed timetables, a good portion of its information is free. One particularly useful tool for travelers who don’t like making connections is the Direct Flight Destination Finder. Just enter your home airport, and OAG will bring up a list of every direct destination from that airport.
The most useful part of the site is probably the “Who Flies Where?” feature, which will bring up all the airlines flying between the two airports you choose. Another nice thing about OAG is that it covers flights around the world, instead of just one area of expertise.
One caveat: when using this feature, be aware that OAG sometimes lumps direct flights (that have stops) in with non-stop flights when offering flights with this feature.
Some people prefer the decidedly low-budget website, WhichBudget.com. This has some of the same functions of OAG.com, but instead of just offering all available flights, WhichBudget.com is limited to budget carriers.
So if there isn’t a low-cost flight between two destinations, it won’t offer any options.
Still, if you’re trying to fly cheap, it can be great. Since only point-to-point flights are included, it’s also a good site for those who don’t like connections.
Another option for finding cheap flights is FlyCheapo.com. Like WhichBudget.com, FlyCheapo relies pretty much exclusively on budget carriers for its flight options. However, this site has a design that’s more similar to a typical travel search engine, especially the “Route Search” feature. Here you can select two airports and see which airlines offer budget flights between them. But again, like WhichBudget.com, if there aren’t any non-stops between the cities you select, no options will show up.
One potential disadvantage to this site is that nearly all of the airports represented are in Europe, or at least, very close to Europe. American, African, Asian, and Australian airports are largely not included in the FlyCheapo database.
However, the site does offer a rather useful news section that announces new budget flights and expansions, and brings up all relevant city news and flight info when you click on a city name in the news section.
So when looking for cheap flights, check out sites like WhichBudget, OAG, and FlyCheapo – they can be a great way to find flights that seem to “hide” from many of the more familiar search engines.
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