Skyscanner is a must-use tool for finding cheap flights and saving money on travel. Here’s how to use Skyscanner to travel for cheap and save a lot of money on airfare.
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What is Skyscanner?
Skyscanner is a search engine that scans a bunch of websites to find flight, hotel, and car rental offers worldwide.
Even though Skyscanner can also help you find cheap hotels and car rentals, I really want to focus on how they can help you find cheap flights because that’s really what they’re best at.
They find these flights through direct partnerships with online travel agencies and airlines. They also have their own technology that can reliably search the web to find the best travel deals.
Why Skyscanner is the Best for Finding Cheap Flights
You can search with flexible dates.
Skyscanner‘s “cheapest month” option allows you to search for the cheapest month to travel from your departure to your destination. You can keep your travel plans flexible, which is one of the best ways to save money on travel. I love this feature because it helps you plan out the cheapest time of year to travel.
Find the cheapest airport to fly into.
Sometimes smaller airports have cheaper flights. And with Skyscanner, you can search for flights to and from an entire country or city rather than a specific airport. You can keep your options open and fly into a cheaper airport or even city and save a lot of money on your vacation.
You can search for the cheapest flights anywhere.
Don’t have a destination in mind and just want to go anywhere cheap? Just put in your destination as “Everywhere” and you can find the cheapest flights to anywhere in the world on your given dates! This search is a lot of fun to play around with.
Set up price alerts.
You can set up price alerts for set dates and destinations so that you can receive email notifications if the flight prices fluctuate.
How to Use Skyscanner
Skyscanner‘s flight search system is really easy to use. Here are three great ways to search for cheap flights.
How to Search For a Flight
1. Enter your departure location and your destination. Fill out the dates, cabin class and number of travelers, and select either Roundtrip, One way, or Multi-city flights. You can select optional boxes like Add nearby airports or Non-stop flights only. Then click Search Flights.
2. Within seconds, Skyscanner will pull up the best, cheapest, and fastest flights. The search is sorted by Best initially, which are flights that offer the best combination of price and speed, as well as flights with the fewest number of stops and least hassle. You can switch the sorting to Cheapest or Fastest depending on your needs.
3. Narrow down your search as needed with the filters on the left of the screen. You can filter by number of stops, departure times, flight duration, airlines, and airports in the area.
4. The search results page lists the airline, departure and arrival times, how many deals they’ve found for that flight, and the lowest price they’ve found.
5. Once you’ve decided on a flight, click Select. You’ll be taken to a page listing websites providing that flight and their prices. You can see ratings on these providers that show how others have found their experience booking with this provider.
6. Decide which price and which provider you want to book with and click Select. This will take you to that airline or travel agency’s website so you can book the flight.
How to Search for Flexible Dates
1. There are two ways to search for flexible dates on Skyscanner. Click in the date field and select Whole month. If you know what month you want to travel, you can search by the full month. If you have no idea when you want to travel, you can select Cheapest Month.
2. This brings up a calendar view. The prices shown are per leg, not roundtrip. They’re also based on other users’ searches and the cheapest flights that came up in those searches. There may be some gaps because a user has not searched for those dates recently, so Skyscanner has no data for it.
3. Prices in green are the cheapest, while prices in red are the more expensive ones. Select a price you like, and the return trip prices will usually update. You can select a date with no data; Skyscanner will just have to check the prices for that date. Once you’ve selected your departure date and your return date, click Show flights (if both dates had a price) or Get prices (if one or both dates did not have a price).
4. You’ll be taken to a search results page for those dates. Follow steps 2-6 above just as you would when regularly searching flights.
How to Search for Flexible Destinations
1. In the destination field, search for Everywhere. Fill out the rest of your travel details as well.
2. The search results page shows a list of countries sorted by cheapest flights available to that country. Click on a country to see the cities with the cheapest flights.
3. Find a city and a price that intrigues you and click to see the available flights.
4. You’ll be taken to a search results page that you’re well familiar with now. Follow steps 2-6 above just as you would when regularly searching flights.
Read next: How to Survive a Long-Haul Flight, According to Frequent Flyers
Ready to take a vacation? Plan your trip with these tips.
- Find cheap accommodation: Use my tips for finding cheap accommodation for travel every time.
- Book your flight: Find the cheapest flights using Skyscanner, my favorite flight search engine.
- Pack for your vacation: Make sure you’ve packed everything you need by checking out my packing list resources.
Cheers!
Paige
Have you used Skyscanner to book cheap flights? Let me know in the comments!
Skyscanner looks very promising.ty
It’s my favorite flight searcher!
I used to use SkyScanner a lot when I lived in Europe from 2011 – 2015. I really loved the ability to use a wild card in the destination. Now, though, when I type in “Everywhere” for a destination (with a specific departure airport and travel dates), SkyScanner just shows me prices for only about 3 cities. Then it list a bunch of other destinations without a price, replaced by the words “Get prices.” Not useful. What’s up with that?
That typically happens when they don’t have enough search data to fill in prices – Skyscanner’s “Everywhere” search uses other people’s searches to show you an estimate, same for the calendar view. The more searches people do for a given route, the more accurate the data Skyscanner can show. If not a lot of people are searching for your dates, it won’t be able to show you prices. You can still click “Get Prices” to have Skyscanner run a search for that destination.