Cheap Flights to London
Don’t pay more than you have to for a plane ticket to England! Just a few simple steps could save you a fortune and get you the best value airplane ticket around. You'll be amazed how much you can save!
However you play it, crossing half the world to fly to England is going to be one of THE most expensive parts of any trip. If you're still at the planning stage then check out my top tips for cheaper London airfares. But if you're booking your flights soon or now, this is the right place to be!
You don’t need to put up with airfares that make you weep. These useful tips will help you get the best price for your tickets – whether you’re going on specific dates, want to know the best-value time of year to fly or if you want the cheapest business-class plane tickets to London without having to sell one of your kidneys: I’ll show you how.
It's all centered around the idea of shopping around in a clever way. You can spend hours on the internet searching a million travel sites and still only getting a small range of airfares. It's because most sites, though they look different, search only a handful of databases again and again. But by following a few logical steps in the right order you can make sure you’ve got the best possible deal for your flight ticket by searching the entire market and not duplicating your effort. Here’s how to do it right:
FOR FLIGHTS ONLY:
Step 1: Gotta find em all – Metasearch today, baby
Try and get past the nerdiness of the word ‘metasearch’: these sites are your friend. I always think of them a bit like that scene in the wizard of oz where the Wicked Witch sends out her precious flying monkeys to spy on Dorothy and the gang. They fly all over the country and come back with intelligence. Metasearch sites do this with airfares, searching hundreds of sites simultaneously to find the most competitive prices; making them, I suppose, your own air ticket precious flying monkeys.
Start with the site behind most of the airfare comparison sites out there. It's called ITAsearch and has all sorts of cool features like flying in to one airport and back from another. Plug in your dates and note down the best of options – be sure to see what airline you’re flying with and which London airport to (though to be honest the airport doesn’t really matter). You could theoretically stop your search here but you can't book it on ITAsearch.
so it’s time to search one more metasearch, Momondo – it’s a relatively new site with few bells or whistles but the coverage is good. Write down the deals from here, too.
Step 2: Move on to the Big Agents
Metasearch is cool because it searches almost all the readily-available airfares. But the biggest agents negotiate special individual deals direct with the airlines – because the agents are so huge they can weedle some pretty good deals sometimes – but you have to go direct to their sites to find out about them – metasearch often misses them. And because these deals are done individually between the companies and the airlines, you’ll need to search three sites to be sure you’re getting the best possible fare.
- Start with Expedia: if you haven’t heard of them you’ve probably been living in a cave since the start of the internet age; it’s good and easy to use and you should have another quote within a minute or two. Write it down.
- Next point your browser over to Orbitz – its domestic deals are good, but it’s also pretty strong on international flights sometimes. Again, take a note of the best result.
- Lastly move in to Travelocity – it’s a bit hit and miss in my experience but it searches tickets that the other sites don’t seem to have available to them and sometimes you can strike lucky.
With the two metasearch sites and these three you’ve searched 99% of the fares available.
If you see a good deal: book it. The best options can disappear fast – and on the very best deals airlines only release a certain number of seats. When they’re gone, they’re really gone.
Step 3: Can the airlines beat it? (optional)
By now you should have covered almost the entire market. If you’re not totally searched-out yet you could now go to the airline sites. Your previous searches should have given you a great idea of which particular airline is offering the cheapest flights for the dates you want to travel – go to the airline’s own website and plug in your flight details one last time. Very occasionally they’ll keep the best fares back for people buying direct from them.
Step 4: review and book.
Review the best fares you've found and book the tickets! Booking them on a credit card gives you extra protection (consumer protection laws make the credit card companies liable for the purchases you make on the cards), so it's always a good idea unless they're charging you a lot in fees.
Once you've booked, you'll almost certainly also want to check out my cool ways to save heaps on any kind of London hotel - from five star luxury to cheap and cheerful (but nice) budget places. And before you ring all your friends and tell them what a bargain you've got, you could also check out ways to save money phoning home while you're abroad.
FOR FLIGHTS AND HOTELS
You can in theory save big by buying a hotel deal with a flight at the same time – the large travel retailers have massive buying power and can pass savings onto you. Airlines and hotels trying to offload extra space like this method because outside observers can’t tell which of them is selling their product cheap – you only see the price for everything bundled together.
The negative side is that you don’t have as much flexibility to choose the exact hotel or area of London that you want – but with potentially large discounts on offer, it's possibly worth checking out.
Now selling fares and hotels together requires someone to 'bundle' them as one product. As a company to do this, you need access to a lot of airfares and a lot of hotel rooms. And then you need to be able to combine the two (at a profit to the company: nothing in life is free) while still saving the consumer money. This whole process is actually horrendously complex behind the scenes. As a result only a very few companies are able to do it competitively. Yup, it's the big travel discounters again.
As with buying flights independently, searching smart is the way to make big savings here.
Step 1: Search the big discounters.
- Start with Expedia, note down the best prices and hotel.
- Move onto Orbitz and do the same.
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Finally give Cheaptickets a try too – it sometimes, if inconsistently throws up some good results. Check them all and compare prices before booking.
Step 2: Check you're getting the best deal
Now be aware that getting the hotel together isn’t always the cheapest option. If you really want to be sure, then you should check (and that means more boring legwork. As a rough and ready guide, go to Kayak.com - one of the metasearch engines referred to above. It's the easiest to use as it has hotels and flights data under one roof.)
First, check out the airfare costs for the dates you're travelling. Subtract the total airfare price from the price you got for the bundle from the big discounters. Divide that number by the amount of nights you're staying in London. That should give you a dollar figure, per night for your hotel in London.
Next go the hotels section of Kayak. Then check out the dollar prices of similar hotels to the one you've been offered on the discounter sites. Are they noticeably cheaper? If so, it's probably worth ignoring the bundled deal.
If you do decide to book independently I have all the info you'll need about getting the best value hotels as well as loads of stuff about how to save a fortune on money exchange and getting the best value telephone option for while you're abroad. Nearer to departure date you'll want to know about saving on London attractions and what the best travel option is for you in London.
This guide was refreshed in early 2011 and is reviewed every quarter to make sure it's accurate and still saving you as much money as possible!
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