Here's the problem nobody names. Every flight search engine ever built asks you two questions: where are you leaving from, and where are you going. That interface assumes you already know the answer to the second one.
If you know exactly where you're going and exactly when, you will pay what that costs. The savings live in the questions the search box doesn't ask.
The search that changes everything
The single most useful feature on any flight site is the one most people never touch: destination "Everywhere", dates "whole month". Instead of pricing one trip, it prices every trip leaving your city, sorted cheapest first.
That's not a nice extra. That's the method in one button.
The search sites, ranked
Ranked for this method — chaining cheap one-way legs across a flexible route — not for booking a return to Malaga in July. A different job would give you a different order.
| # | Site | What it's the best at |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Skyscanner | Discovery. Everywhere + whole month, best budget-carrier coverage. |
| 2 | Google Flights | Pricing a leg you've already chosen, and the map view. |
| 3 | Kiwi.com | Chaining legs across unrelated airlines — with self-transfer risk. |
| 4 | Going | Error fares. Not a search tool at all — an alert. |
| 5 | Kayak | Hacker Fares, as a cross-check on a stubborn route. |
| 6 | Skiplagged | Hidden-city fares. Occasional, conditional, carry-on only. |
| 7 | Flightlist.io | One-way segment hunting. |
The top two do most of the work. Everything below them is for a specific job you'll hit occasionally.
Map search: seeing prices instead of reading them
A list of fares makes you compare numbers. A map makes the answer obvious — you see a continent with prices on it and the cheap corner jumps out.
Google Flights Explore (google.com/travel/explore) opens on your city with the destination already set to anywhere, and puts prices on a map. Widen the dates, then pan and zoom — the map reprices as you move it.
Use it for the question you can't type into a search box: where can I go from here for under £200? Then take the winner back to Skyscanner and price the actual leg.
Map search is the discovery step, not the booking step. It's how you pick the next city in the chain. The search loop below is what you do once you've picked it.
Price alerts: stop checking, get told
Refreshing a route every morning is not research, it's a nervous habit. It also doesn't work — you'll check on the wrong day and miss the drop by six hours. Set the alert once and let the price come to you.
Google Flights price tracking — the one to actually use
Search your route, then switch on Track prices. Two modes, and the second is the good one:
- Your searched dates — tells you when that specific trip moves.
- "Any dates" — watches the whole route and emails you when the month's minimum drops significantly. This is the one that fits the method, because you didn't care about the exact day anyway.
Everything you're tracking lives in one place at google.com/travel/flights/saves. Use Add notification to turn the emails on and off.
Skyscanner price alerts
Set on a specific route and dates. Worth having alongside Google's, for the same reason you run two engines on every leg: different carrier coverage, different answers.
Deal alerts, which are a different thing
Price tracking watches your route. Deal alerts watch every route and shout when something's mispriced. You want both, and they don't overlap. The error-fare guide covers those.
Track the routes you'd genuinely fly, and track them on Any dates. A dozen alerts on flexible dates is useful. Fifty alerts on exact dates is a full inbox you'll start ignoring by Thursday.
The five search mistakes that keep prices high
- 1Searching one site. They cover different airlines and disagree constantly. Two engines per leg, minimum.
- 2Fixing the destination before checking the price. Deciding where first is what makes flights expensive. Search Everywhere and let the price shortlist for you.
- 3Searching exact dates. Whole month, every time. A three-day shift routinely beats any deal you'd have found.
- 4Pricing the whole journey as one ticket. That's the expensive shape. Price the legs. Here's why.
- 5Refreshing instead of subscribing. You will not out-check a price alert. Set it and go and do something else.
The tools, and what each is actually for
Skyscanner — the backbone
Best budget-carrier coverage of the big engines, and the Everywhere / Whole month search is exactly the shape this method needs. Set passengers to one, cabin to economy, include indirect flights, and let it show you what's cheap out of where you are.
Google Flights — the sanity check
The best price calendar and map view of any of them. Fast for pricing a single leg once you know what you want. It does, however, miss whole carriers — plenty of low-cost airlines simply aren't in it.
Kiwi.com — chained routes, with a caveat
Kiwi does virtual interlining: it will stitch together legs on airlines that have no relationship with each other, which is close to what this method does manually. Nomad mode will even sequence a list of cities for you.
The honest risk: those are self-transfers. If leg one is late, nobody owes you leg two unless you've bought their guarantee. Read what you're buying.
Kayak — Hacker Fares
Splits a journey across two airlines and prices it as one result. Useful as a cross-check when a route looks stubbornly expensive.
Going — alerts, not searching
Formerly Scott's Cheap Flights. This is where mistake fares and error fares surface. You don't search it; you subscribe and forget it. More on error fares here.
Skiplagged — hidden-city fares
Sometimes flying through a city is cheaper than flying to it, so you get off at the connection. Two rules, both non-negotiable: only ever skip the final segment, and never check a bag. Skip an earlier leg and every later leg is cancelled automatically. Check a bag and it goes where the ticket says, not where you did.
Flightlist.io
The closest thing to a tool built for one-way segment hunting rather than point-to-point returns.
Run two engines in parallel on every single leg and book whichever comes out lower. They cover different carriers and they disagree constantly. One search site is never enough.
The search loop
This is the actual technique. It takes a few minutes per leg and it's the reason the routes look impossible when you see the final price.
- 1Start at your departure city. Destination Everywhere, dates whole month, indirect flights included.
- 2Look at what's cheap out of there. Not where you want to go — what's cheap. Note the interesting ones.
- 3Take the most interesting cheap arrival city and search out of that city. Everywhere, whole month, again.
- 4Repeat until you've chained your way to roughly where you were always heading.
- 5When a city is a dead end — cheap in, expensive or dull out — back up one step and pick a hub with more onward routes instead.
No tool does this whole overlap map for you. You're doing it by hand, and that manual work is precisely the edge, because almost nobody else bothers.
The searches, on screen, in real time.
The book plus a walkthrough video of me running these searches live — including the routings that worked and the ones that turned into dead ends.
The short version
- FROM and TO is the wrong shape. Search "Everywhere" and a whole month.
- Skyscanner for discovery, Google Flights to sanity-check a leg.
- Two engines on every leg, always. They cover different airlines.
- Kiwi chains routes for you but the self-transfer risk is yours.
- Chain city to city rather than pricing one long journey.