Skyscanner Flights Hotels Cars 7.1 for Android

Skyscanner is one of the most popular and powerful solutions to search for flight deals all over the world. As a metasearch engine, it doesn’t sell the flights or hotels itself. Instead, it searches through airlines, booking sites, rental car companies, and online travel agents to surface what looks like the best deals at the moment. With no booking fees and unnecessary rankings, it’s a clean, powerful tool that turns your dreams of going somewhere into actual plans.

On Android, Skyscanner’s home screen balances a tidy search bar with useful shortcuts, namely Flights, Hotels, and Car Hire plus prompts for flexible date exploration. The overall look is clean, airy, and uncluttered — the kind of UI that makes you want to explore without fear of getting lost in filters. 

Metasearch as Skyscanner’s most powerful feature

Skyscanner’s core value is metasearch. It scans hundreds of sources: major airlines, budget carriers, aggregators, and smaller OTAs, and brings them into one coherent results page. That means the cheapest fare isn’t hidden three pages deep, it’s right there, stack-ranked with times, stops, and fare classes. It also means Skyscanner isn’t just a customer-service lifeline if plans go sideways; the actual booking happens with the airline or OTA you choose. 

Discovery features to inspire your next unexpected journey

Skyscanner’s magic trick is how it makes “I want to go somewhere” feel actionable. A few features are responsible for that: Everywhere Search turns wanderlust into a price-sorted list of possibilities. Set your origin, tap Everywhere, and the app displays destinations by country and city with live-ish price snapshots, like London from €100, Faro from €45, or Bali from €350. Flexible Date and Calendar View are a real treat for bargain hunters. If someone can shift a trip by a few days, the month-style calendar will highlight the cheapest days on a given route. Instead of tapping randomly at dates, there’s a color-coded guide to when savings appear. 

Price Alerts and Saved Trips are quite handy, too. If you spot a promising fare but are not ready to commit, tap to create a price alert, and the app will ping when the fare changes. Saved items let you bundle interesting flights, hotels, or car hires into neat, revisitable lists. 

Skyscanner vs. Google Flights

Comparisons with Google Flights are unavoidable. Google is lightning-fast at showing fare graphs and alternate airports. Skyscanner counters with deeper reach into obscure OTAs and the delightfully flexible Everywhere tool. Many travelers choose to run both: Google for a quick sense check and calendar scan, Skyscanner for alternative sellers, quirky routings, and broader discovery. 

Main drawbacks

Good is easy to spot. The app is fast, clean, and the Everywhere and Map views are pretty useful if someone is flexible. Quirks are mostly about the handoff to sellers. Some OTA sites have clunky checkout flows. A price can change mid-click. A fare shown with “bags included” on one seller might be “bags extra” on another. That’s not Skyscanner mislabeling most of the time but rather the chaos of airline fare families, however, it’s still on the user to double-check the fare conditions before paying. There are also occasional grumbles about missing or oddly placed filters, like wanting to force same-airport returns on round trips or exclude weird overnight layovers by default. Finally, ghost fares. They look dreamy in the monthly calendar but can evaporate when tapped because inventory moved. The app is better than most at keeping data fresh, but physics is physics: airline seats are liquid.

The verdict

Skyscanner is swift at discovery, generous with options, and transparent enough that you feel in control rather than herded. It won’t fix a bad OTA’s customer service and it can’t freeze airline prices in place, but it will help you find what’s out there. For everyone from opportunistic weekenders to spreadsheet-loving planners, it is a powerful and reliable travel tool.