Fareness.com: An Easier Way to Find Cheap Flights

You need a vacation — but if you haven’t settled on a destination and your travel dates are flexible, it can be difficult to find the best possible deal. Enter Fareness.com, a flight search website that launched last year.

While most travel search sites ask you to put in your preferred travel dates (plus or minus up to a few days), Fareness offers larger blocks of travel dates — such as “Next 2 weeks only” or “All of December.” You can select more than one option if you want to search, say, October through January. Enter your departure airport and a trip length of anywhere from 3 to 17 days, and the site will show you fares to destinations around the world.

You can filter your destination results by region (such as Europe or U.S. cities) or theme (beach, popular, family). The results are displayed both on a map and in a Pinterest-style tile layout featuring large, beautiful photos of each destination.

We plugged in Los Angeles as our departure city and came up with some pretty eye-popping fares, including $458 roundtrip to Bangkok and $114 to Chicago, including taxes. (The site lists these as discounts of more than 60 percent over typical fares on these routes.) When you decide on a city and click on it, the site shows a calendar of when the lowest fares are available. Choose your dates and you’re taken to a screen where you can select your outbound and return flights.

The flight selection screen was a little confusing at first, but I eventually figured out that the blue bars under each itinerary represent both the length of the flight and the time of day that you’ll be traveling. You can filter results by departure time, number of stops, airline and airport. Once you choose your flights, Fareness directs you to Priceline to make your booking.

I checked a few of the prices I found on Fareness against those on Kayak for similar itineraries and dates, and discovered that in some cases the fares were the same, while in others Kayak or Fareness was cheaper by a few dollars. This leads me to an unsurprising and time-tested conclusion: You should never book a flight without checking multiple sites.

That said, Fareness is a valuable resource for travelers in the early stages of trip planning who haven’t settled on a destination and/or exact travel dates. While Kayak has a somewhat similar search feature (you type in your home airport and the season or month you want to travel), Fareness offered a more comprehensive calendar of results.

The bottom line? I’ll be adding Fareness to my own personal travel toolkit. Check it out at Fareness.com.