Booking Budget No Frills Flights

As a general rule it is normally cheaper to book budget flights direct with the airline itself and in some cases this is the only option available.

If you book your flight with a budget airline via an agent they will normally add a booking fee (often £5 to £10) to the price of the fare making it more expensive than booking direct.

However, bear in mind that booking a budget no frills flight will not always be the cheapest option depending on your individual circumstances and that some comparison sites will list flights from the budget airlines including Easyjet and link directly to their websites for bookings so avoiding any additional charges and allowing you see other available flight options.

Alas, the price you see when you search for flights is not always the total price that you will end up paying.

Although the budget no frills airlines list their fares including taxes and fees most do provide a genuine no frills service and make additional charges for any optional extras you require. Not only can you find a booking fee is added to the price but it is now common for these carriers to charge extra for hold luggage which can easily add another £20 or so to each leg of your flight.

Depending on your personal circumstances these additional costs often mean that a bargain cheap flight ends up more costly than a higher priced scheduled or charter flight which included these items in the standard fare.

We carried out a search to find a return flight from London Gatwick to Faro Airport for a short break in the Algarve for the period 8th July to 15th JUly 2011 using our own Flight Search and some of the other recommended agents we list on this site.

The majority came back with similar results showing a flight with Easyjet would offer the cheapest fare at £130 plus. Our own flight comparison search found the same flight with Easyjet at £116 booked direct with the airline. This was the basic price and did not include any allowance for hold luggage which would incur an additional charge if needed.

However, Co-operative travel came up with a fare of £125 for a charter flight to the Algarve and this price also included one piece of hold luggage.

Although the Easyjet flight was the cheapest, if you needed to take an item of hold luggage this would add a further £22 to the cost if prebooked bringing the total cost up to £138.

In our case we needed to take a suitcase as hold luggage so booking the charter flight with the Co-operative would have saved us £13.

However, another passenger who was only carrying hand luggage could have saved more than £14 for the same Easyjet flight by booking direct with the airline rather than through an agent.

NOTE: Comparison websites normally show in their listings who supplies the flight making it easy to establish whether you will book with the budget airline direct (saving any additional booking fees) or through a reservation agent.

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