Key takeaways
🪤 The trap: shopping for a flight, not a trip
Flight search trains us to start at the headline number. Find somewhere absurdly cheap to fly, pick that, sort the rest out later. The catch is that two cities with near-identical fares can have hotel bills that look nothing alike — and the hotel is the bigger number almost every time.
🥊 Sofia vs Barcelona: same fare, very different weekend
We ran both cities through the same search: London departure, two adults, 10–15 October 2026, hotels only, hostels switched off. The flights came back in much the same low-cost range — call it £50 each, give or take.
Then we looked at where we’d actually be sleeping. That is the point where the two trips stopped resembling each other. 👀
| Destination | Flights | Hotel | Full trip |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sofia | Around £50 pp | £114 pp | £169 pp |
| Barcelona | Around £50 pp | £483 pp | £518 pp |
The airfare barely matters here. The stay decides it. In this search the Barcelona hotel on its own cost more than the entire Sofia escape, flights included. 😬
🧠 Ask a better question
Instead of “Where can I fly for £50?”, try “Where can I go for £200?” Doesn’t look like much of a change, but it makes a big difference. One is a question about part of your trip. The other is a question about the whole thing.
🧾 What actually decides a cheap weekend
- ✈️ Flights — the return fare, plus everything you will realistically end up adding to it.
- 🛏️ Accommodation — nearly always the reason two “cheap” cities end up miles apart.
- 🚕 Airport transfers — a bargain fare into a field an hour from town quietly eats the saving.
- ⏱️ Usable time — paying a little more for a flight that hands you a whole extra day isn’t paying more.
- ❤️ What you actually want — a trip you didn’t fancy is not a bargain, whatever it cost.
🔍 Search for the cheapest good trip
The fix is to compare destinations on total cost and quality at the same time — same dates, same number of travellers, same standard of stay — and judge them on what the whole escape comes to rather than on the bit that happens at 30,000 feet.
🧭 How MyEscapePlan handles it
MyEscapePlan is built around the trip rather than the airfare. Tell it the kind of escape you want, your dates and your budget, and it compares destinations with flights and accommodation together — so the cheapest flight never gets to decide where you go. 🙌