Flight Search Fundamentals

How to find cheap flights

Frequent flyers approach airline pricing like a game to be mastered. Here's all you need to play to win too.

Ed Fry

October 2025 Edition

18 min read

“£80 to select a seat? That seems insane”.

Except it was for an exit row, flying 14 hours from Abu Dhabi to Melbourne. Stephen’s wife was 5 months pregnant. Business class was thousands of pounds more.

As teachers, their travel dates were limited to the Christmas holidays. It was the last opportunity to see her family.

They'd even searched widely for alternatives too. Their 3-stop itinerary was half the price of economy fares from London.

So was £80 for an exit row fair? Expensive? A bargain?

Stephen couldn't tell. And he's not alone.

In most of the UK, £80 is a decent dinner out. But for flights or add-ons, there’s no reference point. No fixed price menu. No Which? guide for his specific flight with high specific add-ons.

Worse, the travel ‘hive mind’ is filled with myths and anecdotes. Bloggers and travellers obsess over the cheapest days to book or best deal sites — none of which offer a proven, consistent method.

Behind the scenes, airlines and travel agents have dynamic pricing that moves minute-to-minute as seats sell out. It is more like a stock market than buying a sofa.

Travel sites serve up prices that lag behind the real-time market. This is why you can be shown “sold out” fare buckets that aren’t available when you click through to book - that “duped” feeling.

Airline pricing is deliberately opaque. The doubt and delusion are a feature, not a bug. You can be convinced to pay £100s more for a flight with little reason, because you have no benchmark for what is “reasonable”.

Flight search is a game. Some win. Most don’t. Not because they don’t try. But because they don’t know the rules...

Like any game, flight search can be mastered in three steps.

First, build a strong intuition, grounded in facts and fundamentals. Why do airlines charge what they do? What counts as "cheap"? When should you book? We cover these principles in our guide to airline pricing.

Second, learn the methods that work with these fundamentals. Which tactics consistently find cheaper flights?

Third, apply a systematic process. How do you combine these methods into a repeatable search? We detail our complete methodology for members who want the full playbook.

This guide covers step two: the methods that can find cheaper flights. The catch? You won’t know which method will work for your trip until you have tried them all.

This is why finding genuinely cheap flights takes an entire evening. You're not searching once. You're systematically testing every angle until you find the exception that saves hundreds of pounds.

If your flights are over £500, this flight search methodology is worth your time. That includes long haul, group travel (including families or couples), premium cabins, peak dates, or if you’re just a regular frequent flyer where the costs add up.

These are the most successful methods I try for every trip I book.

They are all grounded in over a decade of flight search and 1,000,000 miles flown. Each week, I’d receive a WhatsApp from a friend - a trip in mind and a price to beat. I’d regularly spend an evening researching all these methods in order to save hundreds, even thousands of pounds per trip.

The Great British Take Off is the evolution (or “upgrade”) for those weekly WhatsApp chats. Now any UK traveller can learn to find great flights with our guides, have me find flights for them as a service, or automate their flight search with our software.

Book during the (January) sale seasons

Flights to Boston in Business Class in a January sale: £989.19. Flights to Boston in Economy: £1200.

By booking early, specifically in sale seasons, I could save over £200 and upgrade to flat bed business class. Also, my first flight on the top deck of a 747.

This works because airlines upload extra availability for cheaper fare classes during sales. For travellers who can buy and commit in advance, there are enormous savings to be enjoyed.

Sales seasons are predictable. As a rule of thumb, the end of every school holiday in the UK (Christmas, Easter, Summer) coincides with a spike in search demand, and airline sales. January is the biggest, longest, and most consistent.

This works best if you can save buying for the January sales for travel later in the year (sales are less helpful for last minute travel).

You can also see airline flight deals pages to see any ongoing sales or deals.

Airline's own "Flight + Hotel" packages

London to Istanbul with 4* hotel for 3 nights: £178 per person. Same flights with flights only: £210.

The hotel was better than free - it saved us £32 per person.

Airlines like British Airways and Virgin Atlantic have “Holidays” divisions that sell unique inventory. They book rooms from “bed banks” (wholesalers) and cheaper ticket combinations than buying separately.

There are two scenarios where “package holidays” works best. First, long haul work travel without a Saturday night (like to the USA). British Airways Holidays with a decent hotel and breakfast are usually much cheaper than economy flights alone.

Second, when you’re staying in an expensive city. Even if flights aren’t cheaper, the package holiday rate is often much cheaper.

These are not offered by online travel agents, but with a UK operating airline. You can only find these deals by searching directly.

Note that most low cost airlines partner with external hotel providers, like Booking.com. They don’t “resell” in the same way.

Airline's own "Flight + Car" packages

London to Austin Monday-Friday nonstop: £918 with a car. Same flights with flights only: £1700+.

Adding car hire saved almost £800, almost half the cost.

This works for the same reason as the Flight + Hotel. The operating airline’s holiday division can access different inventory, then sell it cheaper. But, the daily cost of “wholesale” car hire can be much cheaper than hotels (or even the Uber’s you might otherwise take).

Fly drive works best on long haul trips. If you were on the fence on car hire, it is definitely worth checking the airline deals directly.

Combine two one-ways

London to Halifax, Tuesday to Friday: £1504 return with Air Canada. £708 (upgraded to Premium. Economy was about £500) outbound one-way with WestJet + £270 one-way Economy with Air Canada (total £976 return).

Buying two one-way tickets saved £526 (and we upgraded with some of the difference).

This works because it unlocks tickets from different points of sale. Air Canada’s tickets starting from Canada were cheaper than Air Canada’s flat rate tickets from London for the same route. It also tapped into different airline’s ticket pricing.

Combining one-way tickets works best with multi city itineraries. Often airlines try to sell an entire trip in one, but this prices using the most expensive fare classes. You can often find it cheaper to break up trips into one-way and “open jaw” combinations.

To search, you need to check both the return, outbound one-way and return one-way options for all the dates you are interested in. i.e. three searches per date combination.

Add an optional return to one-way fares

Book a one-way flight to New York with British Airways: £1,274. Book a return trip: £726.

Adding a return flight to a one-way can save £548.

This works because most airlines charge more for one-way travellers. One way journeys like emigration have a high willingness to pay where a family may already be committed to moving (but also have a reason to return again too).

Option returns work best on long haul one-way flights. Adding a return far in the future is wise anyway for use cases like emigration. That ticket can be used as is, or changed nearer the time without paying for another ticket later. Think “2(ish) for 1”.

Back-to-back "nested" itineraries

Flights to San Francisco for Monday to Friday: £1400. Nested with an Austin trip a month later: £400 (+ £400).

Regular itineraries:

London to San Francisco return in September
London to Austin return in October

Nested itineraries:

London to San Francisco in September, Austin to London in October
San Francisco to London in September, London to Austin in October

Organising your trip tickets to overlap can save £1000, or more than 70% of the airfare.

This works because it avoids the “Saturday night minimum stay” rule on every trip. Airlines usually mention in their conditions of carriage that you can’t do this, but you can also book with a combination of airlines.

It also enables you to take advantage of other market fares. On Eurostar, a Paris-London return is usually cheaper than a London-Paris return. Regular working week trips travelling at peak times were much cheaper and comfier with a combination of Eurostar trains and British Airways flights.

This works best when you have multiple working week trips to the same country with fixed dates. Regular office travel or conferences where the dates do not change are ideal. You can combine cities (like Austin and San Francisco above) that are in the same country too.

To search this, you need to have a clear, confirmed set of 2 (or more) trips to the same country.

Search all airports near your destination

Flying from San Jose to London nonstop: £1200. Flying from San Francisco to London nonstop: £1700.

Flying from an airport 30 minutes drive away saved £500 (for less than £30 extra cost in the Uber).

This works because some airports (and so the flights they are offering) do not show up for “regular” flight results in an area. This means alternative, cheaper flight options get missed.

This works best when there are a range of airports near to your final destination. Also, if the airports don’t typically show up in search results automatically (like San Jose and Oakland for “San Francisco”) or if there aren’t flights every day.

To find these, you need to shortlist airports by travel time to your final destination address, not just by the destination name.

Self-connect via Europe

Flying from Gothenburg to San Francisco: £445 (with an upgrade to Premium Economy). Flying from London: £1000.

Self-connecting from Europe saved me over £550 - more than half the full cost of the flight, and I upgraded to Premium Economy with some of the difference.

This works for three reasons. First, you avoid UK Air Passenger Duty on the long haul flight (starts at £90). Second, you access different, more competitive market rates. Third, you avoid the premium that nonstop flights usually attract.

Self-connecting does have the added expense of positioning to and from your European starting point (although you can also make a trip of that). The best starting points vary in each market.

To research, you need to methodically work through all the possible (and desirable) starting points, then work out viable positioning flights, then calculate and and compare total “door to door” fares.

Reward flights

Flying from London to Madrid in business class flat bed: £50 return (just taxes and charges). Cash fare in Economy: £220 return.

Using Avios points for flights saved £170 (77%) and resulted in a flat bed business class product.

This works because the airline earns cash from the points balance. Points are just another currency that has real value which have already been “sold” when you earned them through flights, credit card spending, shopping and other activities. The airline still earns cash.

Redeeming on flights works best when you can find a significant cash saving for flights you would have booked anyway. Availability is often the limiting factor, as only a small number of seats are made available for rewards on each flight.

To find reward flight availability, you have to search directly with the airlines or their partner airlines (who can search the same). For more powerful reward flight search, try paid tools like RewardFlightFinderrewardflightfinder.com and SeatSpyseatspy.com that monitor seat availability with UK airlines and set up alerting for you.

New routes and flights

London to Paris at peak time on a new flight: £197.30 return in business. London to Paris at peak time on most trains or planes: £270 return in economy.

Booking a new flight when it launched saved £70 return and an upgrade.

This works because new flights have all the cheapest fare classes available. New routes often launch with sale fares to capture attention and drive bookings, like the £256 return Norse Atlantic flights to Bangkok.headforpoints.com

This works where you have the flexibility on routes or timings to book. Airlines tend to launch new routes and flights in predictable seasonal patterns. More in our upcoming guide.