I can’t believe I haven’t possibly stumbled on this earlier, but I guess it makes sense since I very rarely book cash flights. But I was just helping a friend book a flight to come visit us on our island in Nova Scotia in May, and she was going to fly straight to Poland afterwards, with her route looking like this:

SFO (San Francisco) – YHZ (Nova Scotia) – WAW/WMI (Warsaw)

And shockingly, a direct flight from San Francisco to Warsaw cost $650-850, but if she flew to Nova Scotia first, spent several days on our island with us, and *then* flew to Warsaw, the cost came out to only $453. SFO-YHZ was only $195 on American Airlines, a solid flight with only one layover, and then YHZ-WMI was only…$258. Wtf?

I looked, and it turned out Kayak was showing a flight from SkyPicker. So I looked into SkyPicker, and the premise, at least, sounded pretty promising – they’re able to get ridiculously cheap flights by exploring how to add different segments together from different, competing airlines that normally wouldn’t conspire to show you a consolidated flight itinerary together.

So you might take one leg on say, United, and another leg on American, something that neither airline would show you on their own, as they’re part of different alliances and are ‘rivals’.

I was pretty skeptical that these would prove to be *that* much better than normal flights…and then I loaded their home page, and saw these prices just for domestic flights in America. Mind. Blown.

$20 flights from San Francisco to Vegas? $71 to Chicago? $108 to NYC?

Yeah…ok, I’m sold. From now on, if I ever need to book a flight with cash again, SkyPicker’s going to be my first stop.