Search & book a flight with The Longest Way Home
Since I launched The Longest Way Home I’ve nearly always had some flight booking affiliate option available. Truth of the matter is commissions from airline/flight bookings via affiliates are extremely low. As in cents or even lower!
However in providing travel resources here I wanted to have some form of flight search available to readers and for myself. After a recent affiliate changed their terms of service I took it upon myself to find or create something a little better. Here it is …
Flight search methods
No flight search system is perfect. Airlines are constantly changing prices, dates, routes and itineraries. Keeping up-to-date with it all is nearly impossible. Couple that with the stingiest profit margins in travel it makes online flight search a difficult area to utilize.
I’ve always used several flight search engines to get rough prices. Then, once found, I’ll always check out the airline directly to see if there’s a difference. There usually is!
In picking this system I wanted to cut out as much fluff as possible and simply get the lowest priced flights possible along with new routes and include budget no frill airlines alongside the big carriers.
All the best flights under one roof
I’ve combined as many airlines and booking companies as possible from emirates.com, britishairways.com, to cebupacific.com tigerairways.com to ebookers.com, skytours.com and many more into one big flight search engine to give you the widest choice.
What you get by searching for a flight here on The Longest Way Home:
- Search for flights anywhere in the world
- Trusted and secure bookings via the above websites
- Sort by price, departure time or arrival time
- Filter results based on direct/indirect flights, departure or arrival times
- Filter results to include or exclude certain airlines
- Zoom in and out on the big map to see & link airports directly
- Have prices shown in your own currency
- Many low cost carriers included
- Over 25 languages supported
- Prices include all taxes and no extras
Can you find me cheaper flights?
Yes, but you can do better too! I’ve tried many flight routes using this flight search engine. For example on one flight I tried Bangkok to Kathmandu. I got a return flight offer of $645.
It’s cheaper than Thai Airways. But, I happen to know that the Nepal Airlines office in Bangkok offer peak season fares of around USD$500 if you book in person (they don’t do online bookings). End of story … not quite.
A few weeks later and just before writing up this article I tried the same search again. Only now an Air India price came in at USA $489. They beat Nepal Airlines price! Granted it’s not a direct flight (BKK-DEL-KTM) but the price was better.
I then went direct to Air India’s website and tried with them. Result: USD $457.27!
It’s not a route I would have orginally thought of. But thanks to my flight search I was able to find a cheaper alternative!
Moral of this story: use my flight search – see the price/route options – then check with the airline itself.
Are all the airlines in there?
No. Due to trade agreements, regional database differences and simple business marketing/sales several airlines pick and choose when or whether they enter into the flight search databases. Air Asia is a prime example as is Cebu Pacific.
However the database of airlines is constantly being updated. So, if and when they do release the information it will instantly show up. Likewise with taxes. I noticed one or two airlines stating taxes etc were included in the price. Only to test book a flight and see that they were still adding to them before buying a ticket (Hello Cebu Pacific). This however is not a fault of the search engine. These same airlines do the same on their own sites too.
An easier way to search for flights online
Everyone has their own way to search for flights online. Just like how I searched for the Bangkok, Thailand to Kathmandu, Nepal flight above you might have your own method. I’ve been there and opened up 5-7 windows from all those big search engines and ended up getting annoyed by the whole process.
What I wanted here was a one stop shop flight search instead of a generic window popper or limited search. My search is simply designed to find low prices and alternative routes.
Are there better ways to find flight prices online? Yes, I’m sure of it. A combination of my search plus Skyscanner plus Kayak, Vayama, Flightfox or Googles own matrix.itasoftware.com for example (you can find all those links on my cheap flights resource page).
My advice: find the best price/route with these combinations and then finish up with the resulting airlines own page to purchase said ticket.
For now I’m including my new flight booking & search engine as part of The Longest Way Home. You’ll find this button along with my hotel search in the sidebar here to the right and on individual country pages.
Give it a go and see if you can come up with some flight deals or new cheaper routes!
Search for Flights with The Longest Way Home here
This is an additional feature article introducing flight booking and search on The Longest Way Home
Shout out of thanks: Many thanks to the team of great people who provided feedback, insight and help on this flight search over the past few months. Including Andreas, Hayadith, Maria and the many others who went above and beyond!
Hello Mate, just saw this drop into my mail box. Mighty impressed. No excuse to get out of here now!
Benny, I’ll mark that one down ;)
Hey I tried the search couple weeks ago when I was on your site utilizing the hotel search. I searched for KUL-KTM and the cheapest was Nepal Airlines but I know AirAsia was even cheaper, so I kinda think your system was unreliable :) Good thing you explained why not all airlines are included and cleared my doubt.
Well done on the site and thank Dave.
Hey Mandy!
Yep it’s really like a “live” database the way they update flights. Nepal Airlines is generally the cheapest, but you just can’t book online with them. AirAsia are notorious for not providing up-to-date info into flight searches due wanting to hold onto the profits themselves. See my later comment on German Wings below! Thanks for the kind words though!
Congratulations! Great to see you pushing The Longest Way Home to new heights :-)
I can’t stand all the pop ups on other flight searches. Nice to see what you have done here
Ha ha, no pop ups here. Thanks Anna!
Just tried London Bangkok (LON-BKK) for next month and your search was £2 cheaper than Skyscanner!! Only a tiny saving but every little helps. Buys me a coffee in Thailand!! Thank you Dave!!
Hi Charlotte,
That’s really good to know. Usually Skyscanner does quite well in terms of price! I guess it depends on the flight/route etc. Glad you got a coffee from it though, enjoy!
Sorry meant to say, it’s flying with Qatar!
Looking forward to using this Dave. Good work, keep it up!
Thank you!
Great to see this happening here. It brings up results really quickly. You’ve got me booking flights with you now too.
That’s great to know Jan, very happy to welcome you onboard :)
How does this all work? I mean are the commissions really that small? I’ve not seen anyone else do something like this – just curious …
Yes Sonja the commissions are really, really small on my side of things. So much so I’d say it’s not worth it for many people. Airline profit margins seem to be really minuscule these days. I thought a lot of it was hype from them, but after seeing the “back end” of it I understand why and how so many airlines end up going bust!
Do you think BIG Airlines seize your research (Alitalia,etc),with ridiculous durations and price proposals, while whenever I walk across Pisa(Tuscany)Airport,I watch on the timetable and there’s a German Wings plane landing or taking off to/from Colonia(De).(About 4P.M.).But in their website there’s never a flight in the days required,and they are not shown up by research engines like yours.Could they be always sold out due to Florence nearness?
Hi Giovanna, I did some research on German Wings for you and I think I found the problem. GermanWings only seem to release their flights for the immediate short term. In other words their flights only show up from now until the next 3 to 4 weeks. I could find nothing for them when trying to book in November/December etc. But I did find flights for the rest of this month (October).
Here’s a sample of a Pisa to Cologne flight Which I think were the destinations you were looking for. The cost comes in at around 80 Euro on that date.
I hope this helps and answers your question!
Great work Dave. It this your coding or is it from a company? Intersted to know what sort of commision % you recieve? – I hope it’s worth your efforts and I will certainly support your earnings next time I fly.
Regards – Michael
Hey Michael,
I’ll drop you an email. Yes the commissions are very low. But it’s something I wanted to do here. Affiliates were getting to be a bit ridiculous with their terms & conditions so went my own route so to speak!
What a great addon for your site! I’m sure you’ll have a lot of success with it. I really like that you can chose your departure and destination on the map…never seen this feature before!
Hi Ana, thank you. Yes the map is something I enjoy too. Great for finding those small airports in a country too!
Dave, you have made a good job on integration, but as you said, airticket partner commissions are ridiculously low. Why don’t you look to the direction of accommodation, where commissions are at least respectful? Its worth to make a similar integration with some additional search options that are important for travellers, but overlooked by most of the aggregators?
Hi there,
Yes accommodation commissions are better than flight for sure. I’m already up and running with hotel search here and slowly rolling it out across the site as we speak. Aside from insurance these three seem to be the only services that pull in any sort of decent regular commission.
Checked it, it looks very professional. Have you made it with boo via XML or is it just a sort of cobranded, or white-label? Please give me a hint, it is somewhat important for me to know. Thanks!
Looks very useful! I might as well go ahead and plug Momondo [ http://www.momondo.com ] I’ve found great deals through that site I haven’t been able to match through other means.