Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. My goodness, it's Friday the 21st of June, midsummer,

which means that we're all looking forward to lots of flying this summer, at least on the independent travel desk.

I'm with Ben Parker, the deputy travel editor and Annabel Grossman,

the global travel editor of the independent. You might have heard us yesterday having a good

old ding-dong about how to book rail tickets. Well now we're going to talk about plane tickets.

And this time, Ben, it's your turn to go first. You are flying to

London to Malaga in a week's time. How are you going to find the best deal and book it?

Well, unlike my very lazy approach to booking trains, which is to go to the train line,

when it comes to booking flyers, I will spend time looking. So I will use a sky scanner or a kayak to start with.

And then I won't believe that that's the cheapest deal. So I'll go to the airlines that are coming up on there and I will go to them directly and I will fiddle around with the dates.

And I will even use the incognito mode on my browser, even though I don't believe that actually works.

But I don't know what it is.

But when it comes to booking flights, I just want to get my money's worth and I want to find

the cheapest deal.

I'm fascinated that you say, I don't believe what it says on SkyScan or kayak or indeed

Google flights because generally I find that they're lagging behind a bit, but the fares only

ever go up one way and that's upwards. Oh, no, I mean, it's not based on anything rational.

It's just that I want to, I'm convinced I'll be able to find a cheaper deal. But often I find

that if I don't book it when I see it, I do end up going back the next week and booking something

and it's more expensive.

Annabel, what about you? Let's come up with an example. You're going, oh, lucky you. You're

going from Manchester to Los Angeles tomorrow. Great, which is actually often how it does come

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