Okay, so I needed to book a flight the other day, and I absolutely hate layovers. Hate ’em. Wasting time in airports, rushing for connections – no thanks. I just wanted to get straight there.
So, I did what most folks do. Fired up my computer, opened my web browser. Went to one of those big flight search engine websites. You know the ones I’m talking about, the popular ones everyone uses to compare flight prices.
First thing, I punched in where I was flying from and where I needed to go. Put in my dates, roughly when I wanted to leave and come back. Hit that big ‘Search Flights’ button.
And bam! A whole list of flights popped up. Pages and pages, sorted by price usually. But here’s the thing, most of them had stops. One stop, sometimes two. Some looked cheap, but then you see it’s got like an 8-hour layover somewhere random. Not what I wanted.
So, I started scanning the page. Usually, somewhere on the side, or maybe at the top, there are options to filter the results. You see stuff like ‘Price Range’, ‘Airlines’, ‘Departure Time’. I looked specifically for something related to stops.
Finding the Magic Button
It’s often labeled pretty clearly. I looked for words like:
- Stops
- Number of stops
- Connections
Found it! On this particular site, it was a dropdown menu under ‘Stops’. It had options like ‘Any number of stops’, ‘1 stop’, ‘2+ stops’. And right there, the golden ticket: ‘Non-stop’ or sometimes it might say ‘Direct’.
I clicked ‘Non-stop’. The page flickered for a second, updated the list.
And there they were. A much shorter list, showing only the flights that went directly from my city to the destination city. No messing about.
Just to be thorough, because sometimes different sites have different deals or maybe miss an airline, I opened up another flight search engine in a new tab. Did the same thing: departure city, arrival city, dates. Searched.
Again, got the big list with all the stops. Hunted for the filter section. Found the ‘Stops’ option again. Selected ‘Non-stop’.
Compared the two lists of direct flights. Prices were pretty similar, maybe a few dollars difference, flight times varied a bit. Picked the one that worked best for my schedule and budget.
It’s pretty simple really. The key is just remembering to actively look for that filter option after you get the initial search results. Most search engines have it, you just gotta find it and click it. Saves a lot of headache scrolling through flights you don’t want.
