How to Book a Cheap Flight

It does not matter whether you are an exchange student or just a traveller, it is always an advantage to save some money when it comes to flights, especially if you can spend the money that you saved on something pleasurable, like good food or visiting sights at your destination. But how can we really book a cheap flight? Well, I have some ideas:

• Ryanair
• Skyscanner
• Kiwi.com
• Google Flights

Ryanair

This airline is basically my saviour. I bought a flight for 9, 90€ from Milan to Hamburg Germany with this company. Great. Do not expect a big and comfortable chair and free bar service on board, but who needs that for a few hours anyway? Sometimes they put some sales out and you can simply scroll until you find the deal you are the most interested in, otherwise there is another feature which is simply cool. You can click on "Plan" in the navigation bar on ryanair.com and then under the "Explore" section click on destinations. There you will find all the discounts. Otherwise, under the same section you can find the "Route Map" which looks like the following:

Ryanair

All you have to do is typing from where you want to fly and leave blank the rest. The website will then show you all the possible destinations, from the cheapest to the most expensive. You can also decide to put your budget in there, but I usually leave everything blank so that I can see all the options. Dates are flexible so this is good for students who may have more time perhaps in the summer to just book and go. If you are a worker, try to take a few days off whenever you find cheap deals like these ones. There are even special discounts for Erasmus students.

UPDATE: I know there have been problems with this airlines lately, but even the English Monarch went bankrupt as well so I guess we should just go ahead and trust our gut feeling about all these low-cost airlines.

Skyscanner

With Skyscanner the procedure is almost the same. The difference is that Ryanair is an Airline and Skyscanner is just a search engine. All you have to do is decide where you would like to depart from and then put "Everywhere" in the arrival airport. For dates put "Cheapest month" and then just click on search. If everything goes well you will see this window appearing:

Skyscanner

When you find the country you are interested in going, perhaps let's say Poland, you click on it and you will find all the offers and the month you would fly in and out. With Skyscanner, you can also click on "multi-city", if you will go to more than one place. This search engine will also show you different colours on the calendar, green being the cheapest deal, yellow being more expensive than green, and red being the most expensive.

Kiwi.com

With Kiwi you can put as arrival destination "anywhere" and for the dates, you can put "Anytime". This way you can see all the offers from your airport of departure. Also, there is a map next to you which shows you all the prices as a pop-up for certain places, click on them and see the dates the price is referring to. The cool feature about this search engine is that you can put a range of dates and also a range of airports of departure. For example, if I live in Milan I can put all the airports that serve Milan but also Bologna. I think this website is good for finding cheap flights, but I normally go to the official website of the airline to purchase them because sometimes they are cheaper.

Kiwi.com

Google Flights

Google Flights has pretty much the same features I listed above.

Google Flights

Excuse me if this screenshot is in Italian, but it is very similar to what the other websites offer. Now you are ready to plan your next adventure. Let me know where you will be going!

-Cristian

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