No frills airline Ryanair is advertising £5 flights including standard taxes and charges until midnight Thurs 08 May. This is a full step-by-step guide to using the free Flightchecker tool to find these often hidden flights to bag a dirt cheap trip in seconds.
Are they really a fiver?
Yes, but unfortunately most people will pay more; Ryanair is a cheap-as-chips budget airline, yet sadly its pricing structure leaves a lot to be desired as it considers taking stowed baggage and using airport check-in as ‘extras’.
Yet if you only take hand-luggage and check in online, the flights really can be a fiver. For everyone else, expect to pay more, though it's still easily possible to get to Europe and back for less than £40 all-in.
Ryanair’s ‘extra’ charges
- Taking checked-in baggage.
Pre-book your baggage and it’s £8 for the first suitcase, and £16 per item thereafter; otherwise all baggage is £16 a piece. Baggage over 15Kg is charged as excess (the maximum weight of free hand luggage is 10 Kg).
- If you don’t check-in online.
If you need to check-in at the airport you’ll pay £4 per person each way. This charge is unavoidable for anyone taking baggage. If you’re only taking hand luggage, check-in online, between 48 and four hours beforehand and it's free.
- For paying!
Ryanair charges £1.20 per person per flight for debit card transactions and £3.20 if paying with a credit card. Rather disingenuously it can still claim this is an ‘extra’, as if you pay by the less common ‘Visa Electron’ card it is free.
Speedily find the 1p flights
This is simple to do as it's exactly what the FlightChecker tool is designed for. Simply tell it where you want to go, what your date range is and the maximum you're willing to pay and it'll find every available flight for you. So to find these flights, do the following:
- Step 1: Go to the Budget Airline FlightChecker
- Step 2: Enter your departure airport.
- Step 3: Enter where you want to go. Either check that this destination is included in the promotion (see below) or just click 'I'll go anywhere' to find all routes.
- Step 4: Select travel dates as appropriate.
- Step 5: Choose maximum price £5 inc. taxes and charges. This ensures only the special flights will appear.
- Step 6: Book at Ryanair. Once you've found your flights, go straight to Ryanair to check they're still available and book them. These flights disappear at speed, so don't delay.
- Step 7: Check out cheap hotels or B&Bs. If you need somewhere to stay the Cheap Hotels & Hostels article will show you how to find it cheapest.
When and where are the 1p flights?
Ryanair is clever with its promotions. As the flights aren’t for all dates; the liklihood is, for anyone without huge flexibility, you may find a 1p flight for one leg of your journey but pay more for the other leg. However using the FlightChecker you should still be able to do it cheaply.
- Book before Thurs 08 May. Flights must be at least 14 days ahead.
- Journeys must take place between 17 May '08 - 25 Oct '08: Excluding 01 July - 31 Aug (except for in Ireland where it's 15 July - 31 Aug), plus Friday and Sunday flights aren't included. All school breaks and major sporting event periods are excluded too.
- Departs from the following airports: Birmingham, Blackpool, Bournemouth, Bristol, Doncaster (Sheffield), Durham (Tees Valley), East Midlands, Edinburgh, Glasgow (Prestwick), Inverness, Leeds Bradford, Liverpool, London (Stansted & Luton), Manchester, Newquay
- Destinations: Angouleme, Bratislava (Vienna), Carcassone, Dinard, Frankfurt (Hahn), Geona, Haugesund, Inverness, Karlsruhe-Baden, Limoges, Madrid, Newquay, Oslo (Torp), Stockholm (Skavsta & Vasteras), and Tours Loire Valley.
Want other cheap flights?
If you're looking for other flights not included in this promotion, or further afield, read the main Cheap Flights article, which will show you how to get the cheapest flights anywhere in the world. And if you do nab a cheap flight, why not help the environment by Carbon Offsetting.Keep updated on dirt cheap flight sales:
All top Budget Airline sales are included in the free weekly MoneySaving E-mail
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