Skyscanner.net flight comparison engine

Filed under: Cheap Flights, Travel Tip Written by:Chris Mitchell.

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Trying to find the best priced flight online is still something of a nightmare. Skyscanner is a flight comparison website that makes a brave new attempt to get you the best flight deal

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Buying flight tickets online is the bane of my life. It's OK if I'm looking for a short flight within Thailand or to a neighbouring country - Thailand's budget carriers usually have a cheap offering that I can find direct on their website. But finding the best priced flights for anywhere more than a couple of hours away is arduous. The Internet is over a decade old - you think they'd have solved this problem by now. I'm a big fan of flight comparison site Kayak.com which gives a good overview of what to expect for an airfare, but it's patchy with the budget end of the market in Asia.

SkyScanner.net, however, has proven to be an excellent flight comparision website to use if you're looking for budget flights. It's got a slick, responsive interface that makes inputting your origin and destination easy, and it doesn't pin you down to specific dates either - simply choose a two week period you'd like to fly in and it shows you a graph of the flight costs on each of those 14 days, letting you see at a glance which are the cheapest days to fly on. This is an absolute godsend for routes like Bangkok to Singapore, which have three very competitive carriers who are always offering deals. Skyscanner has all three carriers in its system and provides a side by side comparison and instant assessment of which carrier is cheapest on each date.

Once you've decided on which dates to fly, SkyScanner drops you straight into the carrier's website at the point of purchase, which saves you having to do your search all over again on their own website. (This isn't guaranteed to work with all carriers apparently).

Indeed, the only drawback of Skyscanner is that they don't have every airline in their system. I was quite stunned to find they have flights from Bangkok to Yangon in Myanmar - not the most popular of destinations - but they only have one carrier for flights from Bangkok to Manila, when I know there are several. Presumably Skyscanner intend to increase the amount of carriers they have on the site over time. If they manage to do this, then they are on to a serious winner, as the site is so easy to use it makes finding the best priced flight a breeze. I'd certainly recommend you check it out as one of the first places to look on the Net for flights before going elsewhere.

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Posted on February 11th, 2007.