Help: Holiday flight booking advice.

Hi All

I'm planning a holiday this year with the wifey, it'll be out joint 50th birthday holiday. Due to our general ignorance of all things holiday related we have no concept of how to book a flight to get there. We want to go from South Yorkshire / Humberside / Leeds / Manchester to Florence in Italy later in the year.

Where do we go to book a flight, how much should we be paying, how many stops between flights etc etc etc.

We have had a look at KLM from Humberside and it's coming in at about £211 with one stop, which I presume is at Schiphol in Amsterdam. Is that good or bad? Do you know of anywhere cheaper or better?

Over to you...........

Thanks in advance.

Trebz

Re:

The price is about what I would expect. As a very general piece of advice, use a comparison website like expedia.co.uk to get a feel for the prices and book through them. You might even save some money.

Other than that, it's all common sense really: check reviews, drive on the right side of the road to the airport, etc.

Enjoy!

There will always be someone who says they managed to get a flight for £50 and free upgrade to first class. In my view, while checking through a comparison site is a good idea, it's not worth spending hours of my free time searching for the absolute cheapest deal.

Might be worth a read:
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/travel/cheap-flights/

Re:

Just use skyscanner to find the cheapest deal and then book direct.

I would also be wanting a direct flight if it’s only Italy as a stopover is a pain.

Re: Re:

d8mok":1xlle38s said:

Just use skyscanner to find the cheapest deal and then book direct.

I would also be wanting a direct flight if it’s only Italy as a stopover is a pain.

Click to expand...

That's always a trade off between travelling in the uk, transfer between flights or travel in italy. Depending where you are and where flights go.

I'm flying to manchester in a few weeks from Gothenburg. With a stop over both ways.

This saves me either having to drive to Denmark (4 hours) or Stockholm (5 hours) to get a direct flight. Or driving from Edinburgh or Stanstead to Manchester at the other end (hire car costs and 4 or 5 hours on the road).

The stop over is 90 minutes one way and 60 the other.
So i save 8 or 9 hours of driving plus fuel and hire car costs and get to have a leg stretch and a snack instead. Flight is pretty much the same price.

And googles flight searching tool is fairly passable as well as skyscanner or expedia. Though to be fair, if £211 is for both of you, with KLM, you're probably going to spend more time searching than you'll save on the flight. I've been there before!! a day of searching to save a tenner each way...... then you end up with less baggage allowance and a shitty airline.

Re:

Florence is great, give it at least a week if you want to see everyting including Sienna, pisa and the Tuscan countryside as well as all the buildings and museums in Florence.

I think we we flew to pisa and then trained it to Florence, that was about 20 yrs ago. i'm guessing we flew from either East mids or Manchester, as I generally cant be bothered to drive further.

Leeds/Bradford is a pain in ass to get to. Lots of busy A-roads where you cant overtake and as the airport is exposed, its so windy, flights get delayed/transferred

take a decent camera if that's your thing, a cheap camera phone wont do it justice

Re:

We booked with BA on line and flew direct from London City to Florence last year. The benefits of London City are that the faffing around is so much less than any other airport . You can have a night in town before you fly !

The downside is that Florence is really a small airport so pretty basic. Pisa is better but as a previous contributor above said, its a train ride or long cab ride of over an hour to get to Florence.

Thanks for the advice everyone, we have booked our flights via SkyScanner to Florence airport.

Trebz

Something I've noticed with SkyScanner before (and probably the same with others), the more you use it to look, then say go to a different site to search there, then come back to the original or maybe look at alternative routes, the price goes up as the algorithm sees multiple searches as increased popularity, and the price goes up!

Something I've noticed with SkyScanner before (and probably the same with others), the more you use it to look, then say go to a different site to search there, then come back to the original or maybe look at alternative routes, the price goes up as the algorithm sees multiple searches as increased popularity, and the price goes up!