We have been helping people find the best travel deals online since 1999 so with more and more comparison sites appearing every week we realise deciding which site to use is becoming increasingly difficult.

Why you need to search 2 or more cheap flight comparison sites -

Price comparison sites have become increasingly popular over the past 10 years for finding cheap flights, hotels, car rental and holidays. They can save you both time and money by searching hundreds or even thousands of prices without you having to manually find, visit and search each individual suppliers site.

However, as with any new system it is important to understand how they work and how you should use them to ensure you find the best price rather than rely on any claims they may make.

How flight comparison sites work -
Price comparison sites vary in the methods they use to collect prices but will normally either be using screen scraping (taking prices from another websites page) which is then stored in their database, airfares/route information provided by the airline or agent (which is again stored in the comparison sites database) or live real time checking of fares and availability. Although live checking of airfares and availability seems like the best option it is in fact the least used since it takes far too much time to retrieve the results from a large number of websites, few people are prepared to wait over a minute for the results. To return results quickly the majority of comparison sites search data contained within their own database.
We use a combination of methods including live pricing from selected sites (which will vary according to your departure and destination airports) coupled with data held in our database which is updated throughout the day to achieve a balance between speed and current availability.

Why you should search more than 1 site -
Cheap flight comparison sites are popular because people want an easy way to compare airfares and find the best prices. However these comparison sites are not charities and need to make money to stay in business. Most derive their income from receiving a small commission, often just a few pence, when you click a suppliers link or make a confirmed booking following a link from their site.
Each comparison site enters into agreements with a large number of suppliers to provide their pricing but no comparison site will have agreements with every single airline or agent so prices can vary from comparison site to comparison site. For this reason travel experts recommend you search at least 2 different comparison sites.

There are now hundreds if not thousands of flight comparison sites on the web, many of which will return the same lowest fare, so to help you save time we have included links to the most popular and competitive comparison sites which we think combined with our own flight search will provide the perfect balance between time, effort and price