Flipflops and Floaties

It’s no secret that flying during the school holidays can be notoriously expensive. However, it doesn’t have to be. If you can be flexible with your dates and destination then you can find some really great value flights even for the most expensive times of year.

Below I am going to give you step by step instructions on how to find cheap flights for your summer holidays (or any other time of year for that matter).

Step 1

Download the kiwi.com app to your phone

Step 2

Fill in your details on the app. Try to be as flexible as possible with the ‘From’ and ‘To’ fields. You will see on the screenshot below I have put in ‘Ireland’ in the ‘From’ field, this means that the app will look for flights from all Irish airports. In the ‘To’ field you will see that I have put ‘Europe’, so the app will search for flights to all destinations in Europe. You can be more specific with these fields if you need to be but the more broad you are, the more likely it is that you will be successful in finding cheap flights for these peak periods.

Step 3

Next up is the ‘Departure’ and ‘Return’ fields. More often than not people will pop specific dates in here for the departure and return. By doing this you are limiting the likelihood of you finding cheap flights. Instead I would recommend popping a date range into the ‘Departure’ field. You will see on the screenshot below that I have popped in a date range of 28th June – 20th August. This covers the full school holiday period. In the return section I have chosen 7 nights as the ‘Time of stay’. You can choose any number of nights or even a range of 7 – 10 nights, 7 – 14 nights etc. This refers to the time between your departure and return flights or the amount of days you will be at your destination.

Step 4

Once you press search you will see a list of destinations with starting prices of return flights based on your search criteria. Next you want to tap the tab in the top left corner to filter by ‘cheapest’.

Step 5

Scroll through all of the results until you find something that appeals to you. In the image below you will see I have clicked into the result for ‘Marseille’. There are over 300 results for ‘Marseille’, with the cheapest option being €49 return: Shannon to Marseille 21st July – 28th July with Ryanair. Now that’s not bad at all for peak summer time.

Step 6

This step is important. Once I have found the flight that I want to book I always book the flight direct with the airline. I never book through a 3rd party like Kiwi.com, instead I use this solely as a tool for finding cheap flights.

I hope that you found this blog post helpful. To keep up to date with all of our travel tips, family travel deals and destinations make sure you are following us over on Instagram.