I fly more than 50 times a year. From puddle jumping to Pacific spanning. There are so very many choices for finding a deal on a flight. Each has at least one dedicated zealot who asserts that it is the best. As with hotels, navigation, banking, etcetera it really comes down to individual style when deciding what works best for you. Note that there is a difference between finding and booking.
Skyscanner. I always start here. I found that it does a great job of capturing most, even quirky, airlines. I really appreciate the good/better/best price graphics that help me decide if I should leave a day earlier or later to save some coin. Also helpful is the ‘where can I fly from here?’ search option, so that I can find cheap onward flights (or use it to find an airport that I should fly to to get a better deal to this location aka positioning flight, use the godlike FlightConnections site) as I bounce around on one of those carefree wandering laps.
When booking a quirky and/or expensive link I check Google Flights. I have been quite surprised, usually in out of the way locations, how different the offerings have been. I just sourced an Ulaan Baatur to Los Angeles marathon, and Google served me WILDLY different and MUCH less expensive options than other meta searches, and even showed flights on airlines that when I searched the airline sites were not featured.
My current favorite is Kayak . A clean website. For me the greatest value is the search function up to +/-3 days from your target date. Traveling between sparsely served locations on other sites may return a ‘no flight’ response, but Kayak picks up the ‘we fly on Tuesday, not Thursday option’. Additionally, the flex date search can really save money if you decide to leave or stay a couple of days extra. A recent visit to the US from Australia was 40% less expensive because of their date range search.
Some people love Momondo, some Hipmunk, Cheapoair, Orbitz, (add names of the next ten yourself). A couple of features that are mentioned are: App AI hints as to whether the flight price is probably optimal now, or likely to go up or down in the future; price notifications about flights that you are ‘watching’; and ‘open jaw’ options (I do not recommend knowingly planning what is constructively a breach of contract, but I used that strategy on a flight from Douala, Cameroon to Algiers, Algeria. I was scheduled to be continuing on to Dubai, but simply did not show up for that continuation flight.
I so seldom book flights far in advance that I tend not to use these services. But if you know that you will be meeting family in Bucharest next Easter, it makes great sense to set up parameters and alerts. Skiplagged has a data trove that they share. Book on Sunday, fly on Tuesday or Wednesday. Book European flights 99 days in advance. Definitely explore these ideas, and decide if the time and energy return suitable savings.
In a similar vein there are a bunch of Apps like Lastminute, GTFO, Secret Flying, Justfly, Hitlist, that send you notifications of ‘great deals’ and ‘price errors’. I have tried them all and they do not mesh well with my mode of travel (and really clutter up my mailbox). If I were to be living in one place, and planned to fly from that one town to random locations very regularly, I would absolutely use them.
There are chunks of geography where you have to do more work (Tonga to Vanuatu). I find that the big search engines may return no options at all. Or 36 hour itineraries that connect through Dubai. I have to do some homework for these seldom flown routes. Again, FightConnections website is your friend. Try the tourism sites for the departure and arrival countries. Ask the internet. There are a myriad mini airlines serving small markets, as well as niche companies like HahnAir. The booking process (or enquiry and purchase through email) might involve a Paypal or a Transferwise payment.
Having found a favorite flight I run the search through the airline site if I have a frequent flyer account with them, as occasionally preferred pricing is offered to members. Then through the Amex, Citibank, and Chase travel portals to see if their prices are similar. And am happily significantly rewarded if I book through that portal. However, if you have to change your flight you may have better luck with a direct booking. I just completed a yearlong experiment with booking direct. The airline apps can be childishly awful, and have completely failed on me a number of times. Despite having all the autocomplete options on my ipad I also had to type in my full details 50 times. I evaluated the sites and any perceived advantage, and will continue using perhaps 20 airline sites.
My philosophy when choosing flights is to find the (almost) cheapest for short hops, reasoning ’how bad could it be for one hour?’. For long hauls I am willing to pay a little more to avoid an airline that has a terrible reputation, and move up to one that may be more reliable. As noted elsewhere, there are plenty of connections where there is only one choice (Mayotte to Moroni. Which I chose not to take because it was too spendy. The aircraft crashed the next week).
For the really long (aka expensive) flights I do spend time looking behind a bunch of doors. And have been sometimes astonished at the rewards that this investment in effort has yielded.
Having found your best choice on your favorite search engine, consider the booking platforms that will ticket your ride. Instead of clicking the through link on Skyscanner I open the app of the suggested aggregator and search and book with them because… I do not really know why. I have accounts with the consolidators Kiwi, Trip.com, Expedia and a couple of others (eDreams has a very mixed review history, but has saved me a ton of money twice already), and use whichever is least expensive per the search engine. There are plenty of others out there, but I just do not want to have to deal with too many accounts. Plus I find the likes of Kiwi and Trip.com to be annoying in their marketing. I recommend that you have and develop options, but not too many options. Place a dollar value on your time, so that you do not grind through screens to save $5, and choose the interfaces and providers that make you happy, not frustrated.
Just as with my insurance plans, ‘phone plans, hotel booking providers I spend a few hours once a year doing an exhaustive comparison between my current choices and the other search engines, just to assure myself that the prices are in line with the competition.