GlynI can save you money on your flights to Benidorm. Not a lot on any single decision. Thirty pounds here, sixty there, occasionally a hundred and seventy. But I can only do it if you are willing to negotiate.
The negotiation is not with Jet2, or Ryanair, or easyJet. They will not budge, and there is no phone number to ring where a nice man knocks fifty quid off for cash. The negotiation is with yourself.
Every pound you save on a flight is bought with something. An earlier alarm. A longer drive. A Tuesday departure instead of a Saturday. Sitting three rows from the person you are on holiday with. The airline sets a price on each of those inconveniences, and your job is to work out which ones you genuinely mind and which ones you have simply never thought to question.
Most people never open the negotiation at all. They search one airport, on the dates they had already decided on, and take whatever comes up. That is a perfectly respectable way to book a holiday. It is just not a cheap one.
Before you concede anything, look at the board
You cannot negotiate sensibly without knowing what is on offer, and the airline’s own site will only ever show you the airline’s own flights.
Skyscanner is the tool I use for this, and three of its settings are worth more than all the rest put together. Set your destination to Everywhere and it lists the cheapest places you could fly to on your dates, which is worth doing once even if you have already decided on Benidorm, purely to see how the market is priced. Set your dates to Whole month and it shows a bar chart of the month, so you can see at a glance whether your week is an expensive one. Cheapest month does the same across the year.
Then set a price alert on the route and let it email you. It costs nothing beyond making an account, and it is the only part of this whole business that works while you are asleep. The one limitation is that alerts follow specific dates, so you have to come off the flexible views and commit to a departure before you can watch anything.
Two things I would say about it. Skyscanner is a comparison site, not a travel agent, so it hands you off to whoever is selling the seat, and some of those agents are grim to deal with if you ever need to change or cancel. I use it to find the shape of the market, then book direct with the airline, and I accept that this occasionally costs me a few pounds. Second, no comparison site carries every airline all of the time, so treat it as a very good map rather than a complete one.
Concession one: the airport
This is the big one, and it is the one people resist hardest, because the airport you use feels like a fact about where you live rather than a choice.
It is not. I booked Manchester to Alicante for late September, two adults, return, with reserved seats and a twenty kilo hold bag included, for £426.24. Afterwards, out of curiosity, I priced the same route on the same day from East Midlands, which is nearer to me. Same airline. It came to £449.56 without the bag and without the seats. Add those and you are looking at somewhere near six hundred. The closer airport was around £174 dearer for a worse ticket.
That gap is not a law of nature. Next month it may run the other way. The point is that it exists at all, and that you will never see it if you only ever type in one departure airport. Jet2’s Low Fare Finder lets you tick several departure airports at once and shows you the lowest fare in each month. It takes about ninety seconds and it is the single most useful ninety seconds in the whole process.
The concession you are making is the drive, the fuel and the parking. Sometimes that eats the saving whole. Work it out properly before you get excited.
Concession two: the hour
The unpopular flights are cheap because they are unpopular. Six in the morning is unpopular. Half past ten at night is unpopular. The middle of a Saturday, when everyone’s holiday starts, is not.
I flew out on a late Friday night this September, and I would love to tell you I did it to save money. I did not. I had no annual leave left and could not go anywhere until I had finished work on the Friday, which ruled out every daytime departure there is. The cheap flight was forced on me.
What I did not expect was the second benefit. A late flight buys you a day. You land, you go to bed, and you wake up on the Saturday morning in Benidorm with the whole thing in front of you, rather than spending that Saturday in a departure lounge. On a nine night trip that is a meaningful fraction of the holiday.
The concession is a rough night and a taxi at midnight. If you have young children it may be no concession at all, because they will sleep on the plane and you will not sleep either way.
Concession three: the date
Fares within a single month can vary more than fares between months. A Tuesday out and a Tuesday back is routinely cheaper than Saturday to Saturday, because Saturday to Saturday is what the package holiday market is built around and demand is priced accordingly.
The month calendars on the airline sites are made for exactly this. Open the month, look at the shape of it, and see whether shifting your week by two days changes the number. Sometimes it does not. Sometimes it changes it by a great deal. You cannot know in advance which, which is the whole reason to look.
Two warnings. Fares move constantly, so a price you saw on Tuesday morning is not a promise. And a calendar showing a “from” price for a month is showing you the cheapest seat on the cheapest day, not the price of your particular flight.
The concession here is the shape of your time off. If your leave is fixed to the calendar week, this lever does not exist for you, and no amount of searching will create it.
Concession four: out of one airport, back into another
You are not obliged to come home to the place you left from. Book two one-way flights instead of a return and you can go out from Manchester and come back into Liverpool, or out from Bristol and back into Cardiff, if that is where the cheap seats happen to be.
I am going to be honest about this one: it usually falls apart. If you drove to the airport, your car is at the wrong one, and the taxi or the train between them will comfortably swallow whatever you saved. It works if someone is dropping you off and collecting you. It works if you were getting the train anyway. Otherwise it is a clever idea that costs money.
Worth checking. Rarely worth doing.
Concession five: the bit that is not really a concession
The headline fare is not the price. It is the price of a seat somewhere on the aircraft with whatever fits under the one in front.
Bags and seat selection are where the advertised fare quietly becomes the real one, and they are also where the arithmetic gets interesting. On my Manchester booking, seats and a hold bag were already included in that £426.24, which is precisely why it beat the apparently cheaper East Midlands fare. Comparing headline prices between airlines, or between airports, without adding your own extras to both is not comparing anything at all.
Adding the bag at the time of booking is cheaper than adding it later, and adding it later is very much cheaper than turning up with it. The genuine saving is deciding whether two of you need two bags or could manage with one. That is a real negotiation with yourself, conducted in the spare room, three days before you go.
The one that surprises people: the package may be cheaper
Here is the tip that nobody expects, because a whole generation has been taught that booking it yourself is the clever thing to do. Quite often, the package holiday is cheaper than the same flights and the same hotel bought separately. Not marginally. Sometimes by a distance.
The reason is dull but worth knowing. Tour operators buy hotel rooms in bulk, months or years ahead, at a rate you are simply not allowed to see. When an airline has its own holiday arm, it is pricing the seat and the bed together as a single product and can afford to be relaxed about which half carries the profit. You are not comparing two ways of buying the same thing. You are comparing two entirely different wholesale positions, and yours is the weaker one.
So price the package. It takes five minutes and I would do it every single time, even if I fully intended to book it myself, because the alternative is paying more out of principle.
There is a second reason, and it is not about money. A flight-inclusive package bought from a UK operator is ATOL protected, and under the UK package travel rules the operator carries the responsibility if the hotel is a building site or the airline collapses. Book the two halves separately and you own every one of those problems yourself. That protection is worth something real, and it is free.
The catch is that the package is the concession that takes away your other concessions. Packages tend to come in sevens and fourteens, starting on the day the operator’s aircraft happens to fly, which kills your flexibility on dates. And a package cannot do what we did this September, which was five nights in an apartment followed by four in a hotel. No operator sells that, because it is not a product. It is two products and a taxi in the middle.
Check it anyway. Being right about how you booked is no consolation when someone on the next sunbed paid two hundred pounds less.
What I am not going to pretend
I did not do most of this. I want to be straight about that, because the internet is full of people who present a tidy method they have never actually followed.
My September booking was not a shopping exercise. It was a set of constraints with a price attached at the end. No annual leave, so it had to be a Friday night. Fussy about hotels, and everything we liked was too dear for late September, so we split the stay: five nights in an apartment to pay for four nights in the hotel we actually wanted. Manchester was not chosen because it was cheaper. It was the only airport within reach flying late on a Friday. That it also came out £174 ahead was luck, and I only found out afterwards.
Which is rather the point. A holiday decision is not a straight line down a price comparison. You are trading money against time, against sleep, against how much you like the hotel, against whether the person you are travelling with will still be speaking to you on the Tuesday. The cheapest possible combination of flights and beds is almost never the holiday anyone actually wants.
What negotiating gets you is not the cheapest trip. It is knowing what each of your preferences costs, so that when you decide to keep one, you are deciding rather than defaulting. Sometimes you look at the number and pay it happily. That is a good outcome too.
If you want to see how that works out across an entire booking, I published every line of ours: nine nights, two people, £1,853.34, itemised. Flights, both hotels, the parking, the lot.
Flights are the biggest single number on most Benidorm trips, and the one people research least. If you want the rest of the trip worked out the same way, Benidorm on the Cheap prices up airport parking, transfers, hotel board and the theme parks from four seasons of my own booking receipts, with the actual figures rather than the ones people repeat to each other. It is £7.99, and every update to the 2027 edition is free once you have bought it.
