Ryanair's £5 flights sale

• Are they really £5?
• Speedily find the cheap flights
• Where can I go and what should I know?
• Want other cheap flights?
• Discuss/Other Articles

Five pound coins can take you far...

Are they really £5?

Ryanair can offer these amazingly priced flights because that's all you're paying for; just a flight (although this includes some taxes and charges). But make no mistake: it's a no frills, cheap-as-chips budget airline and recoups its money by charging for ‘extras’ such as checking in baggage, or even just checking in at the airport.

Yet if you only take hand-luggage, check-in online and pay via Visa Electron, these promotional flights really can be had for a fiver each way. For everyone else, expect to pay more, though it's still possible to get to Europe and back for around £40 per person all-in.

Ryanair’s 'extra' charges

• Taking checked-in baggage.

  Pre-book your baggage and it's £10 for the first suitcase, and £20 per item thereafter; otherwise all baggage is £20 a piece. This is per flight. Baggage over 15kg is charged as excess at a whopping £15/kg, though you do get a free hand luggage of 10kg.

• Checking-in.

  You're now charged for the luxury of checking in, which can only be done online, between 15 days and four hours before each flight leaves. It costs £5 per person per journey and if you don't do it, or forget to bring your printed boarding pass to the airport, you'll be slapped with a £40 'boarding card re-issue' fee, per person (forget on your way home and you'll be hit by this charge again).
  
  However, if you book a flight during one of these special 'free/1p', '£1' or '£5' flight promotions, the online check-in fee will be waived.

• For paying!
  
  Ryanair charges £5 per person each way for debit and credit card transactions. Rather disingenuously it can still claim this is an ‘extra’, as if you pay by the less common ‘Visa Electron’ card it's free.
  

Speedily find the cheap 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 £6 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 guide will show you how to find it cheapest.

Warning Note The FlightChecker's not perfect.

Due to a change in Ryanair’s policy last year, we were unable to have it in the FlightChecker for a long time. We're still trialling a new system, so the information isn’t quite as up to the minute and comprehensive as we’d like.

The FlightChecker should work but, if you don’t get want you want using it, do also try manually searching Ryanair (though of course that way takes longer).

When and where are the flights?

Ryanair is clever with its promotions. As the flights aren’t for all dates the likelihood is, for anyone without huge flexibility, you may find a £5 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.

Aberdeen, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Bristol, East Midlands, Edinburgh, Gatwick, Glasgow (Prestwick), Leeds, Liverpool, Luton, Stansted, Manchester, Newcastle & Newquay departures:

• Book before midnight Thurs 2 July.



• Journeys must take place between 14 July & 27 March, with exclusions.
  
  For flights Monday to Sunday though you must book at least 14 days in advance.
  
  All school breaks and major sporting event periods are excluded, plus: 20 Dec - 6 Jan for all routes; 22 Oct - 3 Nov and 12 - 22 Feb for flights to/from Ireland or the UK; 4-9 Dec for flights to/from Italy and Spain; and 12-18 March for flights to/from Ireland.



• Destinations include:
  
  Aarhus, Belfast (City), Berlin, Billund, Bournemouth, Bremen, Brussels (Charleroi), Budapest T1, Cork, Derry, Dublin, Dusseldorf (Weeze), Edinburgh, Eindhoven, Frankfurt-Hahn, Glasgow (Prestwick), Haugesund, Inverness, Karlsruhe-Baden, Kerry, Knock, Limoges, Marseille (MP2), Milan (Bergamo), Montpellier, Oslo (Torp), Paris-Beauvais, Perpignan, Prague, Shannon, Stansted, Trieste and Toulon-Hyeres.
  

Want other cheap flights?