Originally Posted by SchnookoLoly

As Bats has said, it's worth considering the extras that are a cost on top of the base fare. On Air Canada, you select your seats for free as soon as you purchase your tickets. On BA you select your seats when you check in, meaning if you want prime selection you have to be online right at the 24h mark when it opens to get your selection. On Air Transat it's a charge per passenger per direction, I *think* (going on memory) it's something like £10 for a standard seat, or £20 for a premium seat, both in economy. (Premium seats i think were further back where the configuration changes from 3-3-3 to 2-3-2, so the seats of 2 are premium, as well as exit rows and front rows.)

Iceland Air has been offering cheap flights. You stop over in Reykjavik, and I believe you can stay for up to 3 or 4 days without incurring an extra fee as it's just a stopover. It only increases the flight time by about an hour or so, since it's literally on the way.

We usually use kayak.com to search for flights as they search all the various other websites as well as the carriers, so you can work out if the same flight is being offered cheaper on eBookers or Major Travel or Expedia or whoever, as opposed to the carrier's website directly.

Originally Posted by Juggernaut1064

At the time i booked iceland air was listed but not the cheapest, i guess as already stated its about when you actually look to book a flight as the deals constantly change. Some friends from NS flew via iceland air and loved it, they too stayed over for a day or two in iceland and went sight seeing.

Originally Posted by bats

So is my old man. AC, direct. $915 but booked about 6 weeks ago. Toronto to Heathrow. My recent flights on BA were around 800. I don't do Air Transat, by the time you pay to reserve a seat, buy a blanket, extra train fares from Gatwick it isn't that different in price.

Originally Posted by SchnookoLoly

There's no real trend for who comes up the cheapest all the time, as you say. When we were living in the UK and flying back to Toronto, we generally found that if you could find flights for under £500/$900 then it was a good deal. Sometimes it was Air Canada, sometimes it was BA, sometimes it was Iceland Air. We never really considered Air Transat, simply because my husband's family lives west of London, so Heathrow is just a zillion times more convenient than Gatwick - 30 mins drive tops to Heathrow, as opposed to 1h30-2h for Gatwick. So we never really considered Gatwick much. We only flew AT when we flew on our one-way moving flights back to Canada because they were the only place that offered actual one-way fares, so it was significantly cheaper. (Not to mention, AT also only charged a flat £20 to bring a bike as extra luggage, whereas BA and AC wanted £50-75 for a second piece of checked luggage PLUS an extra £25 for 'special handling'.)