Top Ten Travel Tips - August 2007
The Top 10 Cheapest Plane Tickets to Edinburgh in August
Summer should be all about forgetting your woes, jetting off to a fun location, drinking too much, losing important chunks of your memory and finding a totally naked random in your bed. Unfortunately school holidays, profit driven tour companies and fierce traveller competition all conspire to stop you guys from jumping on a plane with an affordable ticket and in the bastardised words of Nike, Just Doing It.
That's why I devoted a morning of devastatingly, delicate and intense research to find the cheapest back door deals on flights over the next few weeks. I picked Edinburgh as the test subject for this experiment in sparing backpacker finances. Here are the cheapest one way fares to the Scottish capital from the English capital, during the first three weeks of August. Take it as a template for your own travel adventures.
Story Highlights
- Travel Supermaket
- Opodo
- BMI
- The Travel Centre
- Lastminute.com
- Travel Bag
- Expedia
- Kelkoo
- Easy Jet
- Harry Potter's Broomstick
1. A great place to start is travelsupermarket.com This site compares hundreds of flights and sorts them by price, airline and the amount of bells and whistles that come with the package. On August 16, 2007 Travel Supermarket can get you to Edinburgh for the modest price of £32.90 with BMI. That includes taxes and surcharges.
2. On the same day opodo.co.uk can get you there for a little bit extra but it's still a bargain at £39.96. That also includes taxes and strangely enough it's also with BMI. This therefore proves the old adage from mother that it's always best to shop around and there are indeed bargains to be had.
3. How much is a flight if you go straight through BMI's own website I hear you cry (I have very sensitive hearing)? Well if you enter the same criteria into flybmi.com you will be presented with the handsome sum of £33. That's ten whole pence more than travel supermarket but £6.96 less than Opodo.
4. High Street favourite The Travel Centre comes in at number four with a less than impressive £53.99. This is with an unspecified low coast airline. Just to put that in perspective, a standard advance, one way ticket with Great North Eastern Railways will set you back £42.00. On the flip side you can sometimes get better deals with The Travel Centre if you check them out at the very last minute. Visit flightcentre.co.uk to see for yourself.
5. Top notch last minute deals also includes the aptly titled lastminute.com where you can get some of the most astounding short and long haul bargains in the business. On August 16, 2007 they recommend British Airways with a fare of £39.70. This makes tip number 5 the third best deal so far, after Travel Supermarket and BMI's homepage. It also shows a BMI deal at £39.80. Do we think that Opodo and lastminute.com are whacking a tariff on top or are they in fact being charged extra for the privilege of offering this flight?
6. Travelbag.com are long established in the budget travel sector and offer the same deals as lastminute.com. However they still don't come close to Travel Supermarket and neither does cheapflights.co.uk. The most inexpensive flight on offer to the budget backpackers within our time frame is £86. Naughty cheapflights.co.uk!
7. Expedia is generally a great site and you can book some amazing deals that combine flights and accommodation. However in this instance when you knock the accommodation out of the equation, the cheapest deal is a £49.80 British Airways flight. It's still worth a look though - especially if you fancy a four day drinking expedition to Portugal and a four star hotel for £180 – just an example.
8. A rather cheeky site is kelkoo.com which will try to sell you a BMI flight for forty whole English pounds. Beyond that their travel bag offer is a whopping £55. We are not amused.
9. Our penultimate money saving ticket can be viewed in all its magnificent glory at easyjet.com where a flight from London Gatwick to Edinburgh will cost you £32.99. It still doesn't beat Travel Supermarket but the nine pence proximity to the best deal earns this fare a very well deserved second place.
10. Have a Turkish Coffee followed by a few shots of absinthe, read as much of the new Harry Potter book as you can and pass out in bed with images of flying to Edinburgh on a Broomstick filling your mind. Do not however contemplate mounting an actual broom and jumping off something high. That would be a very short trip, wrought with a good deal of post traumatic cleaning.
In summary, stick to Travel Supermarket and Easyjet for cheap flights in Europe this summer. The rest of this money saving prescription can be useful but side effects do include a considerable amount of time, digging and computer screen syndrome.
