My mother recently asked me to plan a family trip while my nephew is on summer break. Originally, we were planning to just travel domestically to a kid-friendly destination. But since Taiwan has eased Visa restrictions for Filipinos, I suggested we consider Taiwan instead. If you’ve been tasked with making travel arrangements, you know how much of a nightmare it can be to just get everyone’s availability and commit to a date. It can be really stressful and such a hassle booking flights especially if you’re doing it for several people and official airline pages take forever to load.
Once you’ve navigated through multiple airline tabs to decide on which airline to take, you have to select so many options to fit your travel date, input passenger details, and by the time you get to the final step: payment, the transaction won’t go through or an error occurs. Or when you check back, the airfare prices are suddenly different.
Traveloka makes booking flights crazy easy because you can easily compare flights across multiple airlines within the app alone. By booking through Traveloka’s website or through the app, you can easily see which airline provides the lowest and final prices for your chosen dates.
I used Traveloka’s website to check the prices of flights for Manila to Taiwan and it automatically sorted flights by lowest price. Traveloka has partnered with various domestic and international airlines across the globe, so you can easily see the flights available on different carriers. Interestingly flights to Taiwan come out cheaper than some of the other domestic destinations we were considering. For Manila to Taipei, lots of airline options came up including AirAsia, Scoot, Philippine Air Lines, EVA Air, China Airlines, China Southern, Xiamen Air and Cathay.
When choosing a flight, there are various filters you can use. You can filter by your airline preference, departure or arrival time, price per passenger and facilities. For flights with transits, it includes number of transits, transit duration and transit points. For personal trips, my preference is usually the lowest prices. I used the filters to immediately rule out anything that involved a transit (so flights will be direct) and limited the price range. I also sorted the available flights by trip duration and preferred departure time and the results displayed instantly. The shortest flight duration for a Manila – Taipei flight is Philippine Air Lines (PAL), just 2 hour and 10 mins, departing 7:15 am and arriving 9:25 am.
The time is good and the flight automatically comes with 30k baggage allowance, an in-flight meal and in-flight entertainment. I love flying PAL especially for international trips because of the in-flight entertainment and comfort. However, since there are three of us and a one-way flight already costs over Php 9,000, it felt a bit steep.
The best option I could find is Air Asia with a flight duration of just 2h15 min direct and just a little over Php 3,000 (without any baggage allowance or meals). They have two flights departing either midnight and arriving early morning or departing 7:50 am and arriving 10:15 am. I always prefer mid-morning flights so that you arrive at a reasonable time to check in a hotel, settle a bit and have the rest of the afternoon free. I’ve gone on a lot of trips via AirAsia for work and am a fan of their Santan in-flight meals, which I feel are more budget-friendly than dining options provided by other airlines, so it was an easy choice.
Price Alerts & Cheap Price Finder
If you’re planning you trip in advance, the price alert feature comes in very handy. When you search for flights, it will take you to a simple screen where you input the origin, destination, departure date, number of passengers and seat class. The app will scan and show you all the available options on different airlines, which you can sort and filter by price, departure times, arrival times or flight duration. The Cheap Price Finder feature also lets you see and compare rates across the months right on the booking calendar, and know when the flights are cheapest.
