3 November
Hanoi in November. I can train it to Brussels or Frankfurt if that's cheaper, I really don't mind.
Amsterdam · Brussels · Paris · Düsseldorf · Frankfurt → Hanoi
5 searches
5 departure airports × 1 date
135 options · 12 seconds
The right departure date was worth €147 on New York and €9 on Lyon
Every route here was searched on all seven of its departure dates, so the spread is exactly what moving your dates would have saved you. 8 of the 9 returned more than the €10 we charge to look, and the best of them returned 14 times it. You cannot tell which kind of route you have until someone checks.
| Route | One-way fare across the week | Cheapest | Dearest | You save |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New York JFK | €400 | €547 | €147 37% | |
| Newark | €400 | €544 | €144 36% | |
| Singapore | €335 | €479 | €144 43% | |
| Philadelphia | €490 | €625 | €135 28% | |
| Boston | €432 | €534 | €102 24% | |
| Turin | €109 | €148 | €39 36% | |
| Innsbruck | €84 | €121 | €37 44% | |
| Geneva | €89 | €119 | €30 34% | |
| Lyon | €119 | €128 | €9 8% |
Every route was searched on all seven of its departure dates, and the bars share one scale, so the Alpine routes really are that much cheaper than the Atlantic ones. The percentage is the saving measured against the cheapest fare, which is why Innsbruck beats New York on flexibility while costing a tenth as much. Eight of the nine spreads beat the €10 a Survey costs. One-way economy fares, the cheapest showing when we looked.
Cabin makes its own point. Across that Singapore week economy moved between €335 and €479, while premium economy sat at €822 on every single day. The step up cost €343 on the dearest economy day and €487 on the cheapest. The upgrade never moved; only the thing you were comparing it against did. Fourteen searches and 37 seconds bought that answer.
Seventy-five searches took us 200 seconds. By hand they take two hours.
Four briefs, seventy-five searches. One search is one route priced on one date, so a brief that leaves both open is not one question but dozens — and dozens is exactly where a row of browser tabs stops being any use.
16–22 January
Somewhere with snow, third week of January? Don't mind where as long as it isn't a fortune to get to.
Amsterdam → Geneva · Innsbruck · Lyon · Turin
28 searches
4 destinations × 7 dates
575 options · 75 seconds
3–9 November
Singapore in November. Is premium economy actually worth it that week, or am I paying €500 for a bigger seat?
Amsterdam → Singapore, economy and premium economy
14 searches
2 cabins × 7 dates
1,060 options · 37 seconds
19–25 December
New York for Christmas. Or Boston, or Philly if it's cheaper, anywhere I can get a train in from.
Amsterdam → JFK · Newark · Boston · Philadelphia
28 searches
4 destinations × 7 dates
1,172 options · 76 seconds
75 searches in 200 seconds of actual searching, which returned 2,942 options across 58 airlines. Run by hand at a generous 90 seconds each (type the route, wait for it, scan the results, write the price down) the same 75 searches take about 1.9 hours. The largest of the four — twenty-eight searches across four American cities — is a €10 Survey. That by-hand estimate is the only number on this page we did not measure.
Ruling out the Gulf cost €73 on Singapore and nothing at all on Hanoi
Say you will not change planes in the Gulf. We read every option first, then take away the ones that connect there. On Singapore that took out 113 of 1,060 options and put €73 on the cheapest fare; on Hanoi it took out 50 of 135 and changed the price by nothing. You only find out which by having priced both.
Press to drop every option that connects in Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Muscat or Kuwait.
Cheapest €335 €408 without them
Cheapest €320 unchanged either way
- LHR 486
- CDG 437
- FRA 355
- MUC 271
- BKK 120
- ZRH 111
Connection counts across all 2,942 options, in which 66 different airports appeared. Excluding a hub matches an option's connecting airports only, so it never rules out your origin or your destination.
There are 62,425 ways to reach Hanoi, and we read the map in 0.16 seconds before pricing one of them
Every line is one way of getting from Amsterdam to Hanoi within a stop budget. Nothing here has a price on it yet. We look at what connects to what first, and then go and price the routes worth pricing.
16 Up to 1 stop
Amsterdam to Hanoi, walked over a map of 3,425 airports and 19,257 direct connections in 0.16 seconds. Nothing here is priced, timetabled or bookable; it is a static snapshot of what connects to what, capped at 3× the direct distance, and we use it to decide which routes are worth searching.
AUHBAHKWICDGZRHDOHFRABKKDXBMUCLHRMCT
THAI · Nonstop · 11h 5m €476
China Southern · via Guangzhou · 18h 50m €322 €154 less
How it works
- 1
Send a rough brief
Where from, where to and roughly when. Several destinations is fine, and so is vague, because vague is the part we are good at.
- 2
We price every date
One search at a time, a few seconds apart, because a flight site that gets too many requests at once stops answering. It takes minutes, and you do not have to sit through them.
- 3
The report lands
A PDF with the prices day by day, every option ranked by price and journey time, and a link to book each one. The last one of these found €147 between the best departure date and the worst. You book in the same place you always did.
You pay for the searching, not the seat
One date is cheap to answer. Five destinations across a fortnight in two cabins is not, because it is far more work: the New York job above took 28 searches to find the €147 between its best day and its worst. That is a €10 report returning fourteen times its price, on one leg, for one traveller.
€3–€10 · what we charge
€147 · New York JFK
You pay for how much searching you ask for, because that is the part that takes the time. A Survey is split across several runs, and return-trip date grids are capped at 21 departure and return combinations; everything else is a matter of how much work you want done.
One route on one fixed date? Do not pay us for that, because Google Flights does it free in ninety seconds. We are worth paying once you have several destinations and a spread of dates — which is where tabs stop being any help, and where the spread is usually worth more than the fee.
Send a brief
Only the destination is required. Everything else is a tap, or leave it and we will use our judgement — the vaguest briefs are the ones worth most, because they have the most dates to be wrong about. The report comes back the same day.
- We do not book or ticket anything. We find the options and hand you the links.
- Prices come from public flight search results rather than from the airlines, so they are what was showing when we looked and they can move before you book.
- Display price only, with no baggage rules, fare conditions or tax breakdown.
- The engine is a public command-line tool called flt. It is on GitHub, and you are welcome to run it yourself and skip us entirely.