When you’ve had a pretty rough day in the office, there’s only one thing better than getting home, slumping on the sofa with a mug of green tea (and a white wine chaser) and booking yourself a much-needed flight abroad, and that’s stumbling across the deal-slash-steal of the summer.
Nothing beats it.
You can feel your belly doing a bunch of delicate barrel rolls as you carefully rush through the payment process, the smile on your face growing and growing until you finally click the “confirm” button, your brain now fizzing like a can of shaken Fanta because you know the few hundred bucks you’ve just saved on the journey is going to be spent on beachside cocktails, fancy restaurant meals and a semi-snazzy hire car the moment you touch down. It’s the ultimate spirit-lifter.
The problem is: boy-o-boy can it be tricky to pinch pennies on ye olde flights. In fact, saving money on flights is a modern day art form, and in order to become a total master - let’s call it ‘the Pablo Picasso of booking airplanes’ - you need to have the right tools.
Of course, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Ha! I’ve got Kayak and Expedia perpetually open on my laptop.” And, yeah, that’s kinda cool n’ all, but neither of them is that great. Actually, coming to think of it, all your big-name search engines fall short in their hunt for greatness. They might “work”, per se, but to squeeze any sort of cheap fares out of them you need to spend hours and days on the prowl, and even then you rarely save more than a few measly quid [insert long empathetic exhale].
That said, the world isn’t short of travel hacking apps. They’re a dime a dozen - more common than green leaves in a jungle canopy - but only a few of them can actually claim to be genuinely legit, useful and downright epic at finding cheap airfare deals. Thankfully, they’re the ones we’ve dug up for you.
So, without further ado, here are eleven websites the best money-saving savants have kept secret from you (while enjoying the fruits of repeated savings themselves). Trust us: the next epoch of your life going to be blessed with mega-cheap flights.
Heading overseas should never be stressful. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to book a family holiday, your honeymoon, a business trip to catch up with your favourite clients or a put-your-feet-all-the-way-up all-inclusive - it should be as relaxed as the images in your head. You know the ones. Beach towel pinned to a white sand beach with three conch shells and a cocktail, waves forever washing the shore as you twiddle a piece of sea glass between your fingers and try to guess which brand of Factor 50 you can smell wafting in the air. But reaching this point has always been marred with stress; your body hunched over a laptop as you skip between the 79 tabs you’ve opened, hoping you don’t pay a pound more than you have to because you can’t bear the idea of taking that regret abroad with you. It’s the part of travelling we all love about as much as falling off a bicycle on a gravel driveway.
But thanks to the eleven sites above, these days have been exiled to the past-tense - twice over. Not only do they take the headache out of flight hunting, they also guarantee you’ll get the best price no matter what sort of trip your planning, what timeframe you’re operating on or how nonchalant and relaxed your travel criteria might be, all of which begs the question: why are you still reading this? Go and get your next escape booked in.
Thanks for reading. For more ideas on how to embrace the endless summer, chase the horizon and keep your skin sun-kissed all year round, follow us on Instagram and Facebook, and sign-up for a naughty-little newsletter below! (you’ll get a cheeky 10% off if you do).