budget flights in Asia

ka4426

I've found a good way to track down budget flights in Asia.

For big, international flights, the best route to find the cheapest flight is definitely to use a screenscraper, where you enter your requirements and the site searches many suppliers. Good ones are travelsupermarket or traveljungle (I prefer traveljungle because, although it's a bit slow, it allows you to start journeys from non-UK airports). Or lastminute.com if you really must, but I have had dreadful service from them on two occasions when I tried to change flight details.

However, the timetables for many budget airlines aren't on the screenscrapers websites. There's no simple site that searches them all. However, a good starting point is the list of these airlines (for the whole world, but not totally up to date) is at thebigproject. It gives you links and a one-line description of each airline's area of operations.

I am going to be in Hong Kong soon (very cheap flight to get there from Oasis HK - only £99+tax single, and there are tickets from £75 on every flight!) and I needed to work out how to get to Sydney. Now, it's difficult for budget airlines to get into Australia, as the government appears to have some dodgy and perhaps anticompetitive arrangement with Qantas.
I couldn't find any cheap flights from HK. So I looked from a cheap flight from any major airport in SE Asia, and found one via thebigproject's site from Bangkok by JetStar.

So then I needed to get to Bangkok, and I was getting frustrated by the only flights I could find being at the wrong times of day or very expensive. So I tried something new - I looked at the Wikipedia entry for Bangkok's new airport, and saw the list of airlines flying in there. Some of them were neither on the screenscraper sites nor the list of budget airlines. A little bit of following links led me to China Airlines, where I indeed found the flight I wanted at a price I wanted.

And I think this could work for any destination. Rarely do the airport websites themselves list all the operators in an accessible way, but Wikipedia has a formulaic approach so you will always see comparable data. And these low-cost airlines normally do not work like the big flag carriers, where a single costs nearly as much as a return, so if you are working out a big multi-stop journey like I was, they work a treat!

I've put this on my blog, with links enabled, here.