"Aviation tips from the site" will share with you a few secrets of how to make a trip around the world with minimal cost, and will show you how easy it is to do it using special services.
Suppose you are planning to go on a weeklong trip around Europe, and you have a tight time frame: you would not want to waste time traveling by bus or train. You need to get as quickly as possible, for example, from Spain to Germany. Obviously, this can only be done by plane. But how to correctly plan a route and at the same time not overpay for air tickets if your trip, for example, looks like this: Moscow-Madrid-Porto-Cologne-Moscow?
There are several types of routes:
- Simple route. For example, Moscow-Prague-Moscow. Flights can be both direct and with connections in other cities. If you plan to transit less than a day, then you can use the ticket search form on the main page.
- Composite route.For example, Moscow-Madrid-Porto-Cologne-Moscow. It is easy to compose such a route from the search bar by clicking on "Difficult route".
- Open jaw. For example, Moscow-Larnaca-Brussels-Barcelona-Moscow-Saint Petersburg. Please note that the start and end points are different. Sometimes these routes are called “forks”, and sometimes they are more profitable than if you returned to the point of departure. You can compose an open jaw in the same way as any complex route.
A complex route can be set up in several ways:
1. Check the price separately for each flight segment. For a complete picture of the best dates and times for your vacation, check out.
Select your destination city and indicate that you need a one-way ticket.
We hide the selection window and see that it will be most profitable to fly from Moscow to Paris for 2.4 thousand rubles in May and October.
Download our free flight search app now!
The best prices in the app.
Tickets are always at hand!
Great start to your journey, don't you agree?
2. Make a difficult route at once. On the flight search page of the site, click on "Difficult route" and select all points of departure and arrival, as well as dates.
In the same window, you can check the price for the open jaw route, when the first and last points differ.
Sometimes the price difference is significant, so it's worth checking these route options.
Judging by the results, it is more profitable to return from a trip to Moscow rather than to St. Petersburg.
Now we will consider one rather unsophisticated, but at the same time very rare, way to save money. It is so primitive that it’s even strange that it is hardly mentioned anywhere. So now we will try to fill this gap and tell you what a "difficult route" is (or, as it is often called, a "compound route") andhow you can save money with it and to whom it is suitable.
Savings of 25,000 rubles!
To begin with, I'll tell you exactly how we stumbled upon this most "difficult route", and after reading it it will immediately become clear to you how you can save on air tickets personally!
So, it all started with the fact that we needed to find and buy air tickets to the USA, and, preferably, as cheaply as possible.
What was the main difficulty? We needed to visit New York and California, which meant that on top of the expensive transatlantic price tag, we would have to add some money for the expensive domestic flight. There were not many options:
- Chelyabinsk - New York - Chelyabinsk plus New York - Los Angeles - New York. Price: 120,000 rubles.
- Chelyabinsk - Los Angeles - Chelyabinsk, without visiting New York. Price: 90,000 rubles, with New York - not real 132-136,000 rubles.
- Chelyabinsk - Moscow - Chelyabinsk (14 thousand) plus Moscow - Los Angeles - Moscow, performed by Germans or Austrians. Price: 70,000 rubles. If we also add the flight Los Angeles - New York round trip - RUB 115,000
As I didn’t dig forums and search engine sites, I could not find anything more profitable. The cheapest option came with a flight from Russia to Los Angeles for 70 thousand, with 1-2 transfers, and without visiting New York. As a result, we began to be inclined to think to completely throw New York out of the current trip and visit it some other time.
I already had a case, I was a little sad that I would die, and I would not see New York, when suddenly, by chance, in the Google Flights service (not the most convenient, but rather smart metasearch engine) I came across the "Difficult route" button.
What is a difficult route?
Here it is necessary to make a short digression about what the "Difficult route" is:
- One way flight - when we fly from point A to point B.
- Round-trip flight - in this case we fly from point A to point B, and then back to point A.
- Difficult route - we can choose as many flights as we need, and we are also free to handle the necessary points of departure / arrival as we please.
A small example: a flight from Chelyabinsk to Ho Chi Minh City, the next flight will add Bangkok - Singapore, and from Singapore we will fly back to Russia, but not to Chelyabinsk, but to Ufa. And this, in the literal sense, a difficult route can be bought with one ticket! The flight of imagination is not limited.
What will be in relation to our case?
It turned out that if you specify Chelyabinsk - New York, and then Los Angeles - Chelyabinsk as a route, then you can fly for 79 thousand, and if you change Los Angeles with New York, the price becomes 74 thousand!
It remains only to pay extra for the flight Los Angeles - New York one way (or vice versa) 20 thousand in order to get the total price of all transfers in 94 thousand, which cheaper by 20-22 thousand the most profitable, but not very comfortable flight operated by Europeans!
Why is the difficult route so beneficial?
The savings here are formed because of what - when we choose a round-trip flight, no matter how far we travel during the trip from the point of our initial arrival, in any case we will have to return to the same initial point in order to fly back.
And any transfer costs money and time.
Having correctly selected tickets for a difficult route, you will not have to spend money on the transfer to the place of departure, and you will save a lot of time. So this is the rarest way of saving, which not only saves money and time, but also increases comfort.
The only point to pay attention to - all points on your difficult route must be served by either one airline or airlines of the same alliance.
Despite the fact that a very specific and rather specific example was considered here (due to rather expensive flights within the United States), with the correct route planning, this method can be used everywhere, both in trips in Europe, and in Asia with Africa (well, in Russia, of course, especially since the prices for domestic flights here, as in the USA).
In what cases it will not be possible to save money using the "difficult route"?
In some cases, a complex route still cannot be applied:
- If you are a fan of flying to some city, sit there for 3 weeks without getting out, and then fly back home. In this case, naturally, a difficult route will not help you.
- If your route is between settlements it is more expedient to move not sequentially (i.e. flew to point A, from there went to B, from there swam to C, etc.), but radially (flew to point A and from there you make round-trip sorties to B, C, G, etc.).
- If you are planning to go around a small region and do not intend to travel far from the city of arrival. For example, if you decide to see Bavaria, then having arrived in Munich, it will be more expedient to fly from Munich, rather than from Frankfurt am Main.
- If during the journey you have climbed into such a jungle where neither planes fly nor ships sail. In this case, there are big doubts that the search engine will be able to pick up any tickets for you.
In all other cases, this method can be used and decently saved.
Algorithm for buying a ticket for a difficult route?
Here are the search results. If you like something, click on "Buy for ... .." to start the standard procedure for buying a ticket. In terms of cheapness, the example is not entirely successful, I just needed to demonstrate how to search for tickets on a difficult route.
Now you know how easy it is to find and buy tickets with a difficult route, as well as how to search so that a “difficult route” is more profitable than simple round-trip tickets.
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Getting from Minsk to the city of your dreams, while not going broke and not dying at the airport, waiting for a connection all day long - hundreds of websites and applications can help you with this. Good news: you don't have to go through them all to pick the best ones. We have selected 11 services for planning the route - we hope this list will appeal to both thoughtful and spontaneous travelers.
Rome2rio
Which is more profitable - plane or train? How to get to Schiphol Airport from the center of Amster? Can you get to Azores from Minsk? All these issues are easily solved by the Rome2rio service. Here you can plan a route and pick up tickets for planes, trains, buses and even ferries. The system offers the best combinations of transport in terms of time and money, shows photos (you know exactly what awaits you - double-decker bus with sockets and Wi-Fi or the old man "Ikarus") and plots the route to the nearest minute.
If you are bothered at work or just want to escape from the city for the weekend, hit the "where" box with the phrase Direct Flights - Rome2rio's escape plan is already ready. Are you lost in the city, and the plane is three hours later? Dial Nearby Airports in the same window - the system will help you get to the place before the end of registration.
Kayak
One of the world's leading ticket search engines, Kayak, will tell you how and where to fly cheaply, help you plan a difficult route with several cities, and prompt you in time if prices for your dates fall. A flexible filter helps you to choose the most interesting way to fly, to avoid shitty airports and transfers for 20 hours.
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Europe's largest ticket search service offers to find a convenient flight from city A to city B. After the route is drawn up, the service redirects you to the ticket seller's website, where the transaction takes place. The main life hack when communicating with Skyscanner is to always check direct flights on the websites of the airlines themselves: sometimes it is cheaper.
In Skyscanner apps, you can create beautiful charts with price movements by week and month. There is an alert function - as soon as the prices for your dates change, you will know about it in a few minutes.
Momondo
Convenient selection of tickets allows you to sort offers according to the criteria of "cheapest", "fastest", "optimal", and also adjust the number of transfers, airports and types of tickets. In the "Where to Go" section, you can plan the perfect trip - depending on your interests and budget, the service will offer the most profitable destinations for a ski vacation, shopping or a night out. City descriptions are delivered separately - for example, developers call London "an old punk in a new wig", and Bangkok - "sour-sweet-shameless".
Hipmunk
Forbes called the service "the new gold standard for finding airline tickets," as Hipmunk not only helps to organize flights between two points, but also famously plans tours with multiple destinations and connections. With the help of this service, you can also sort airplanes where there is Wi-Fi - for some reason the developers are especially proud of this. Search results are presented with beautiful graphics, and the site symbol - the pilot chipmunk - waves its paws so happily while the search is in progress that the hand itself reaches out to bookmark Hipmunk.
Bravofly
This service does, in general, the same thing: it searches and compares offers on air tickets from different airlines... The trick is that Bravofly is considered one of the best specialists in connecting flights, which, as you know, are often even more profitable than direct ones.
Last Minute
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If you wake up in the morning and decide you are going on vacation tomorrow, check out the Last Minute website. Here you can pick up "last minute" plane tickets, as well as rent a car and book hotel rooms that are already desperate to sell something to someone - and therefore will give them back for 30% of the price if you book today for today. Quick search, many filters - trying their best to make your spontaneous journey as cool as possible.
Drungli
The Drungli Adventure Generator selects the cheapest random destinations available at the moment. If nothing came up this time, you can subscribe to notifications about specific prices and cities, and the system will notify you as soon as something worthy of your attention appears. Drungli is incredibly simple and intuitive, looks cool and develops great willpower, because looking at dozens of penny sentences every day is not for weaklings.
OneTwoTrip
After the route is drawn up, it's time to buy tickets. The OneTwoTrip online checkout contains cheap (and not so much) offers from 800+ airlines. Here, as in search engines, you can select tickets, filter out nonsense (for example, flights that are often delayed) using a flexible filter system and buy directly on the website, choosing a seat on the plane yourself. The price calendar helps you compare prices, and if you find something more profitable, you can cancel the purchased tickets in one click. Most often with a 100% refund.
By the way, if you buy a ticket through the app, you get a mind-blowing 1% bonus.
Balkanviator
If you are going to hang out or eat, use Balkanviator - this service will help you deal with transport in the unpredictable Balkans. Choose bus routes or ask for a fellow traveler - fortunately, the site has all the information about carriers. Balkanviator is great for finding out timetables and making maps of crossings - you still have to buy tickets from carriers. And most importantly, remember the golden rule of Southeast Europe - locals never use trains south of Belgrade, since they can be several hours late.
Do you use other services when planning your trip? Do not keep to yourself - share in the comments.
Today I will share with you how and where you can buy tickets on the Internet for a complex / compound route. Difficult is not because it is difficult to do, but because the departure cities are different. For example, as I mentioned in the last article, let's look at this example of a flight today:
Moscow-Vienna-Barcelona-Moscow
Those. you fly from Moscow to Vienna, and return to Moscow from another city - from Barcelona. And, accordingly, you cannot set the Moscow-Vienna-Moscow route in the search engine, as it would be convenient to do it on a skyscanner.
For an illustrative example of the search engine, which will be discussed today, I will omit the Vienna-Barcelona domestic flight and show only in screenshots how a simple ticket search scheme occurs on a complex route with a flight to one city and returning from another, i.e. with a flight to Vienna and a return from Barcelona in our example.
So, what search engine helps us with this? Where can you find and buy tickets for multiple routes? I present a search engine today
This is how its interface looks like. Let's start to analyze the work of air sales, friends. I will not dwell on the fact that on this search engine, of course, you can search for tickets on regular routes, i.e., THERE AND BACK, for example, Moscow-Hamburg-Moscow.
But today we are interested in a compound route. So, we enter the necessary cities, select the dates of flights on the calendar, note the number of adults (let's take 1 for example).
We have the following flight data:
By the way, you can also add an internal flight Vienna-Barcelona here. You can add, in principle, several routes, each time using the button "Add another flight", but I do not recommend it, because the total amount for tickets will shock you)) I advise you to search for domestic flights in other ways, using low-cost websites, which are not always displayed by search engines. But today we are not talking about them, so we will limit ourselves to two flights.
I will say for the future for children: if you are flying with the whole family, which can be immediately noted in a search engine, for example, two adults and a child. And choose how many children you have from 2 to 12 years old and the number of babies under 2 years old.
Also select the flight class: ECONOMY or BUSINESS and click FIND TICKETS:
By clicking MORE, we can find out the details:
- First, a transfer to way back takes place in Dusseldorf
- Secondly, the docking is long and night. We see that the arrival in Dusseldorf is at 22:40, and the departure to Moscow the next morning at 08:50.
That is, choosing such a flight, you will have to spend the night in Dusseldorf, which is not very convenient. It’s one thing if the docking lasted during the day, you could walk around the city and fly away in the evening. But in our case, the docking is at night, so pay attention to that.
So, this cheap option is not suitable, however, like the next one below with a docking already in Vienna, but also at night.
Go ahead and look at the next option, also with a transfer in Vienna, but not at night and not so long. Arrival in Vienna at 4:15 pm and departure at 8:40 pm. Docking takes 4 hours and 25 minutes. I will say right away - this is also inconvenient, tk. there is a lot of time to walk around DutyFree, but not enough time to get out into the city. And besides, if you wanted to get out of the airport and take a walk around the city, then you would have to re-check-in for the flight, and this takes time.
As a result, having quickly looked through several options, I personally liked this one with a transfer in Zurich (more or less long and daytime) - there will be time to walk around Zurich. Look: the arrival in Zurich is also at 11:40, but the departure is at 21:00. Docking lasts 9 hours 20 minutes, which already seems interesting
I just showed you how to choose connecting flights. Let's say you don't want to fly with a stopover and are willing to pay more, but fly only direct flights. In this case, tick only direct flights. And we see that the cost of direct flights is much more expensive - 22,847 rubles. Shown in the screenshot:
On the search service, you can sort by many criteria, for example:
- Indicate what is the maximum price you are willing to pay for a ticket
- What time is it convenient for you to fly. Personally, I usually like to fly from Moscow in the morning, so as not to lose the whole first day, but to use it productively on a trip, and I like to fly back in the evening or even at night. Therefore, here I moved the time slider and set the flight from Moscow to Vienna until 12 noon, and back from Barcelona to Moscow after 9 pm
- You can also specify not only the departure time, but also the time of arrival in cities
- You can mark the duration of transfers if you are considering flights with transfers, as we saw a little earlier. For example, if you were interested in a transfer no more than 3 hours, the search engine would no longer offer you flights with those long night connections that I showed you in the screenshots above.
I display the sorting options in the picture below. For example, when you just entered the parameters of the departure time you are interested in, then the flights have already significantly decreased and in fact there are only 3 left, when you fly from Moscow in the morning, and from Barcelona at night by direct flights:
And these are not all criteria. You can also choose alliances that include airlines, if you have any special preferences, and the airlines themselves. To select specific a / c, you must first uncheck the box "ALL" and then check the box next to each airline you are interested in:
Using the example of the following screenshot, I will show that you can still choose payment methods and airports of departures, arrivals, transfers:
I also like the search service has one very cool option - search for cheap flights on the map. This function is also available on the main page of the site below under the search form:
By clicking on VIEW PRICES ON THE MAP, before the world map with prices for air tickets opens, you will be asked to learn how to work with the map. Having agreed, they will show you step by step how to work with the map. I recommend it will take less than a minute.
Therefore, I will not dwell on working with the map in detail. Experiment right now below and you will find out where, for example, is the cheapest way to fly.
On the main page of the site there is an opportunity to subscribe to the newsletter of special offers. Then you will be aware of airfare discounts. The site has a lot of useful and interesting for travelers information.
Study, friends, and use it to your health, especially since it provides an excellent service to buy tickets on the multi-route, which I told you about today.
After all, it is often more profitable to buy tickets in this way than separately. BUT not always !!! Therefore, I strongly recommend comparing 2 options: here is such a composite route and a one-way ticket search, i.e. in our case, you will also need to check the prices for the flight, first on the Moscow-Vienna route, and then also find out the prices for a one-way ticket from Barcelona to Moscow and add up the two received amounts - will it be more profitable to buy tickets individually or the entire composite route as a whole. It happens that it is cheaper!
Friends, I tried to introduce you in detail to the function of the composite route on the service and I hope that this post will be useful to you. Share your impressions in the comments, I will also be interested to know if you have already used this search engine before. After all, it is considered number 1 in Russia, although I personally prefer skyscanner. As they say - taste and color
In the future, I will record another video tutorial on working with the search service and show in more detail how to search for and buy cheap plane tickets.
Many have noticed that in flight the plane makes more than a dozen turns, and often in different directions. There is a popular opinion among passengers that course changes are related to dispatcher commands and are intended to prevent aircraft collisions, but this is not entirely true. When flying outside the aerodrome area, in the vast majority of cases, this task is performed by specifying different heights and speeds for a particular flight. A natural question arises, why not fly in a straight line with minimal maneuvering during takeoff and landing? The fact is that there are roads in the sky, as well as on earth - airways, whose main task is to streamline aircraft flows and achieve the most efficient use of airspace. In this article we will tell you why air routes are needed, how flight route a specific flight, what is the role of the pilot and the dispatcher in this process, why the same flight can be operated on completely different routes on different days.
Flight along the shortest route.
Obviously, the most profitable route is the so-called orthodromy — shortest distance between two points on the earth's surface. On the map, the orthodrome looks like an arched line, which is due to the fact that the map is a projection of a spherical earth onto a plane.
The shortest distance is Moscow - Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.
Of course, flying in a straight line from point A to point B is faster and more economical than flying along a "broken" air route. However, until recently, a flight along such a trajectory was practically impossible to perform, which was associated with the capabilities of navigation equipment. In addition, if all aircraft were flying on erratic trajectories, at the current stage of the development of air traffic control systems, this would lead to the impossibility of "separating" all these aircraft in the air. There is also a wide variety of restricted and restricted areas that cannot be flown through.
Traditional navigation.
Historically, the flight route consists of a sequence of so-called intermediate turning points and " lags"(From the English leg) - sections between them.
Airways network over Moscow.
At the dawn of aviation, the need to perform en-route flight was associated exclusively with the implementation of navigation tasks. The basic method of navigation is a flight from one characteristic landmark to another, of course, this method is applicable provided the ground is visible, i.e. in visual meteorological conditions. By the way, visual navigation is still actively used in "small aircraft".
With the development of aviation, it became necessary to perform flights in the absence of visibility of the earth's surface, i.e. by instrument only. This is how the navigation method appeared, called radio navigation... The essence of this method is that radio stations were installed at certain points of the route, the crew on board determined the direction to the radio station and performed a flight to it. Over time, a device was developed called automatic radio compass (ARC), which allows you to determine the direction to the radio station with high accuracy. The radio stations themselves began to be called "drive" or in English NDB (non-directional beacon). The range of such transmitters is about 250 kilometers, which necessitated the creation of a rather extensive network of stations. Over time, more advanced and accurate radio beacons have appeared VOR, the range of which is up to 350 kilometers. It is these distances that determine the length of the route section, while it must be understood that it is possible to maintain the direction not only by flying to the radio station, but also from the radio station.
Drive radio station and airways.
Ground-based radio navigation techniques are widely used in civil aviation, however, today the main method of navigation is. The flight is still carried out from point to point, but now they are only a conditional name and geographical coordinates, the installation of any ground means is no longer required.
Formation of the route.
So, how is the flight route of a particular flight formed, along which the plane will eventually fly. Below we will tell you how this happens in major airlines.
Any serious carrier has an air navigation department, which, from the existing network of points and routes, forms several route options for each flight, usually 5-10 routes. These routes are saved in the airline's database and loaded into on-board navigation systems aircraft, they are called "Company routes".
Vnukovo - St. Petersburg route option.
He prepares a specific flight on the day of departure. flight dispatcher, it is this specialist who chooses the optimal route, assessing all the restrictions on the route and meteorological conditions. It often turns out that the flight is more long route much more profitable due to different wind speed and direction in different areas... The selected route is approved and submitted to air traffic services, i.e. dispatchers.
Thus, pilots receive ready route the flight according to which the flight will be operated. During the flight, changes can be made to the route, for example, if possible, the controller can allow the so-called "straightening", i.e. exclude one or more intermediate points from the route. In addition, by decision of the commander, dangerous meteorological phenomena, usually thunderstorms, can be bypassed.
Actual track line. Sheremetyevo - St. Petersburg.
As already mentioned, the flight route of the aircraft consists of a sequence of points and routes, below we will give a real route from Vnukovo airport to St. Petersburg, this is how the pilot and the dispatcher see it.
UUWW UM4D UM DCT AR DCT OBELU B239 AJ R369 DB B964 LUKIR LUKI1A ULLI
UUWW – international code Vnukovo airfield
UM4D - designation of the departure route (SID)
Um - driving radio station "Ivanovskoe"
DCT - "right on"
AR- drive radio station "Buzharovo"
DCT - "right on"
OBELU - point designation
B239 - route designation
AJ - drive radio station "Staritsa"
R369 - route designation
DB - drive radio station "Pochinok"
LUKIR - point designation
LUKI1A - designation of arrival route (STAR)
ULLI - international code of the Pulkovo airfield
The designation of the route already includes a sequence of points, the very name of the point or the driving radio station is indicated in the route when changing the route. Reduction DCT (direct to) is used in cases where it is impossible to fly on the route, or the air traffic services authority is allowed to plan off-route flights.
As you can see, when forming the route, as well as 50 years ago, drive radio stations are used, however, along with them, unmarked navigation points are also used.
In preparation for departure, the pilot enters the route in the form of a sequence of points into the on-board navigation computer. The data of each point (name, coordinates, callsigns) are already contained in the onboard database. If the carrier uses pre-planned routes company routes, the pilot only needs to select the route index, for example "UUWWULLI01". It is easy to guess that UUWW is the departure airport (Vnukovo), and ULLI is the destination airport (Pulkovo), 01 is the serial number of the route option.
Onboard navigation computer control panel (FMS).
Future.
Already today a number of european states introduce in their airspace concept Free Route Airspace, the essence of which is that instead of air routes, only information about navigation points is published. Flight planning is carried out along any route passing through the published points, while it is sufficient to select only two points - the entry and exit from the zone.
Another promising development of the organization Eurocontrol - the main air traffic services unit in Europe - concept Single european sky, i.e. “One European sky”, its essence lies in the abolition of the boundaries between the various sectors of air traffic control in terms of route planning, so that it will be possible to fly across the entire European region in a straight line.
