With a plethora of routes and airlines it can be tough to sift through all the options, so Nick Trend delivers a five-step guide to finding the lowest fares to Vietnam.
Travellers have never had such a big choice of flights and airlines; and fares to Vietnam have never been cheaper. But tracking down the best price is not as easy as it should be. I tested eight leading websites to see if they could produce the cheapest fares to Vietnam and found a mixed picture. So to help you through the maze, here is my guide to finding the lowest fares to Vietnam.
Find out who flies where
Most of your research is likely to be based around fares to Vietnam, but if you want a comprehensive overview of which airlines fly to and from the airports you are interested in, try flightmapping.com. I really like the clean layout of this site: it’s easy to see what your options are, and it is one of the most comprehensive. It doesn’t give any prices (just links to the booking site of the relevant airline), and, unfortunately, it isn’t always fully up to date. There were also one or two technical glitches that meant I couldn’t view some of the maps even though my computer software is bang up to date.
Either book…
If, once you have checked which flights are available, you know that you want to fly with a particular airline from a particular airport, you might as well go straight to that airline’s site to book. Most of the price-comparison sites below will click you through to that site in any case, and if you start with the airline site, you will at least be sure that you are getting live, up-to-date fares to Vietnam.
Price-comparison websites are, in theory, the easiest way to find the cheapest fares to Vietnam. But they can also be misleading. First, most do not list fares to Vietnam from every airline operating the route; second, they do not normally quote exact fares to Vietnam. This is because they are not quite up to date, because they can’t replicate the many preferences that an individual might have – to check in baggage, for example (see below) – and because they can’t reflect all the different booking fees that might be charged for using different credit or debit cards. As I found with my spot-check, they can also be subject to technical hitches without the user realising. Even so, they are a useful guide, as long as you bear in mind the limitations and check at least two or three as part of your research.
I tested both price-comparison sites and agency sites (see point 4) with a simple search for the cheapest fares to Vietnam from any London airport, departing on June 9 and returning on June 16. At the time of checking, the cheapest overall fares to Vietnam was with Ryanair from Stansted at £91.98 (or £79.98 if you happen to have a Ryanair cash-passport card). The cheapest fares to Vietnam with easyJet was to and from Luton at £134.98 (including debit card fee and administration fee). As my results show below, you need to check more than one site to be sure you are getting a true picture of what is available.
Note that none of the sites I checked includes hold-luggage charges where they are optional. This could add at least £50 return (summer rate) to a Ryanair flight, for example.
Skyscanner.net
This is the site I normally turn to first. It is well laid out and there are some clever, easy-to-use features. It allows you, for example, to compare the fares to Vietnam by airline, narrow down your preferred departure times on both legs, include "combined" fare options – i.e. flying out with one airline and back with another – and exclude particular airlines from the list. It managed to come up with the correct fares to Vietnam of £92 with Ryanair.
Travelsupermarket.com
This returns results from one of the largest selections of airlines and agents and is usually straightforward to use. However, the site was not working well when I tried it. It returned no results for Ryanair, Monarch, Thomas Cook or Thomson, despite the appearance of icons that suggested it was searching for their fares to Vietnam.
Furthermore, the cheapest fares to Vietnam – for the Luton flights with easyJet – was offered through a link to an agent called Bravofly. This appeared to be cheaper even than fares to Vietnam offered on the direct link to easyJet.
I smelt a rat and, when I talked to Travelsupermarket, it turned out that the site was suffering from several serious technical problems. It had broken connections with all the airlines mentioned above, and the result for Bravofly included a mistake, showing a return flight to the wrong airport. When I asked why users were not warned of these technical problems with a cautionary message on the home page, I was told that it had been considered, but not acted on. Not a very satisfactory situation for one of the leading price-comparison websites, which claims to offer "comprehensive, independent and impartial travel deal comparison". The cheapest "correct" result that came up was on the easyJet Luton flights at £125.98 – though quoted fares to Vietnam do not include payment charges and so this was £9 less than the actual cost of booking.
Kelkoo.co.uk
The shopping price-comparison site recently relaunched its travel pages, which are well-designed and reminiscent of Skyscanner's in layout. However, fare comparisons don't include some key charter airlines, and, more critically, the site doesn't list Ryanair fares to Vietnam. However, it successfully returned easyJet's cheapest fares to Vietnam at the correct minimum price of £134.98.
Kayak.co.uk
Excellent, uncluttered design with useful features and quick to use. It came up with one of the biggest selections of airlines and also lists the cheapest fares to Vietnam – those with Ryanair – though it underpriced them at £88; you would have to pay more if you clicked through to book with the airline. It also found the easyJet flight from Luton, this time correctly priced.
Check the agency sites
These sites take the booking themselves – you don't click through on to the airline site as you do with the price-comparison sites above. They can be useful – you can put together packages including hotels and hire cars that are financially protected, for example. But they normally charge a booking fee for flight-only arrangements, and it isn't always clear how much extra you are paying.
Expedia.co.uk
This is the best-known online agent, with lots of search options and package arrangements. However, it does not book with Ryanair, and as a result, my search returned a lowest price with easyJet of £131. I can't report whether or not it could deliver the
fares to Vietnam (slightly less than you would pay when booking direct), because a message told me that an "internal error has occurred… we are unable to continue processing your request at this time". Another disappointing performance from a leading site.
Opodo.co.uk
This site has a limited selection of airlines, including only two for direct flights: Ryanair and Monarch. EasyJet was not listed. I was quoted fares to Vietnam on Ryanair's flights from Stansted of £88 – but "due to a system error" I was unable to reach the final booking page to check the bottom-line price.
Ebookers.com
Yet another disappointing experience. No Ryanair, and the fares to Vietnam for the easyJet Luton flight ended up at a total of £151.43 – £16.45 more than it cost to buy the same flights direct from easyJet.
