Book flights like a router, not like a passenger.

01 ~ The number

What it actually cost

I needed to get from Madrid to Davao, which is the southern end of the Philippines and not a place anyone flies to directly. I typed both ends into Google Flights the way everybody does. It said €667.

I booked for €319. Same week, same bag, one stop more. The difference was not a secret website or a mistake fare. It was asking a different question, four or five times, and letting an assistant hold all the numbers while I argued with them.

None of this is clever. It is just four questions that no booking site will ever ask on your behalf, because three of them lose it the sale.

02 ~ Move one

Split at the last hub

Almost every long trip ends with a short domestic hop, and that hop is where you get quietly taxed. Madrid to Davao priced as one journey was €667. Madrid to Manila on its own was €438. Manila to Davao, bought straight from Cebu Pacific, was €40.

Four hundred and seventy-eight against six hundred and sixty-seven, for the same aircraft. The long-haul carrier was reselling me a two hour flight at a markup of roughly five times.

You give up protection when you split. If the first leg is late, the second ticket is gone. I was willing to wear that at Manila, because I am landing in my own country and the worst case is rebuying a €40 flight.

That is the trade, and it is the only honest way to describe it. A through ticket is insurance. Decide what the insurance is worth on your particular connection rather than paying for it by default.

03 ~ Move two

Price the detour

This is the part that changed how I travel. I stopped asking what it costs to get where I am going, and started asking what it costs to leave from somewhere else.

Iberia flies Madrid to Marseille for €59. The TGV from Marseille to Paris is €60. Oman Air leaves Paris for Manila at €300, which is €138 less than Qatar wanted out of Madrid. Add it up and the whole thing, with three days in Provence in the middle, lands at €471 ~ seven euros cheaper than flying straight home.

Click through the routings below. Every number is a real quote I pulled while planning this trip, and the bar is scaled against that €667 baseline.

The detour was free. Not cheap ~ free. I did not take it in the end, for reasons in section six, but I would never have known it existed if I had kept asking for the cheapest flight to Davao.

04 ~ The wall

What the search engine hid

Halfway through planning, every cheap option I had found vanished. Air China disappeared from Madrid, from Barcelona, from Venice. A route search for Barcelona to Beijing returned no nonstop at all. I wrote it off and moved on, and told myself the Beijing plan was dead.

It was not dead. It was just not being shown to me. Air China was selling Madrid to Manila on its own website the whole time, one ticket, 23kg included, for PHP 19,708 ~ about €279.

An aggregator is a sales channel, not an index of the sky. Airlines drop in and out of them over distribution fees, technical faults and spite. When a route looks impossible, open the airline's own site before you believe it. That one habit was worth €159 on this trip, which is more than the entire flight to France.

05 ~ Steal these

The prompts

Five prompts, in order. The trick is that none of them say “find me a cheap flight”. They ask for structure first and prices second.

I need to get from Madrid to Davao on 31 August. One way, one adult.
I don't mind layovers. Budget matters more than speed.

Before you price anything, tell me:
  - which hub airports actually serve my destination
  - whether the final domestic leg is cheaper bought separately
  - which other airports I could depart from, and what it costs to reach each

Then price the three cheapest realistic routings, all-in: trains,
airport transfers and the domestic hop included. Show the breakdown.

Price Madrid to Manila and Manila to Davao as two separate bookings.
Compare that to the same journey as one through ticket.

Tell me the saving, and exactly what protection I give up if the
first leg is delayed.

I'd rather not fly straight home. For every city within a cheap
flight or train of Madrid, work out:

  cost to get there + cheapest long-haul from there + the domestic hop

Rank them against flying straight out of Madrid. I don't want the
cheapest option ~ I want to know which detours are effectively free.

For the routing you just recommended, tell me what would make it fail:

  - is every leg on one ticket, or am I self-transferring?
  - do I need a visa or a transit permit for any stop, on a
    Philippine passport specifically?
  - does this flight actually operate on that day of the week?
  - if leg one is two hours late, what do I lose in money and time?

Check this fare on the operating airline's own website, not an
aggregator. If the price or the flight doesn't match what you found,
tell me which source is wrong and show me both numbers.

Prompt four is the one people skip and the one that earns its keep. An assistant that has just found you a bargain is the worst possible judge of that bargain. You have to ask it to attack its own work, in those words.

06 ~ The checks

The four questions

Four things nearly cost me real money, and all four came out of prompt four rather than any search result.

The visa. The cheapest routing of all was €315 through Shanghai, with a 22 hour layover. China's ten day visa-free entry does not cover Philippine passports, and the booking was two separate tickets, so I would have had to clear immigration to collect my bags. That fare was never real for me. The 24 hour transit rule, which does cover every nationality, is what makes the 13 hour Beijing stop work ~ and at nine airports, Beijing included, a temporary entry permit lets you leave and see the city.

The separate ticket. Half the cheap results were tagged “self transfer”, which is a booking site stitching unrelated tickets together and quietly handing you all the risk.

The day of the week. Venice to Manila on 3 September was €215. On the 2nd it was €504, because the airline does not fly it daily. Shortening that trip by one day would have cost €289.

The clock. I checked the same searches 24 hours apart and the Barcelona plan went from €306 to €481. Fares this close to departure move in one direction. A plan is not a price.

07 ~ Copy this

The checklist

• Price the final domestic hop on its own before accepting any through fare
• Ask what it costs to reach three nearby departure airports, by plane and by train
• Open the operating airline's own site before believing any search engine
• Confirm whether each leg is one booking reference or several
• Check transit and visa rules for every stop, on your actual passport
• Check the flight runs on your day, not just that the route exists
• Trusting the cheapest number on the first screen ~ mine was a 45 hour routing through a visa I don't have
• Assuming one search engine sees every airline. Mine missed the one I flew

The honest lesson is not that AI finds cheap flights. It does not. It is reading the same public pages you can read. What it does is hold eleven routings, four currencies and a visa rulebook in its head at once without getting bored on the ninth search ~ which is exactly the point where I used to give up and buy whatever was on the screen.

I spent about forty minutes on this. I saved €348 and learned that three days in Provence were sitting there for free. Next time I am taking them.