London to Seoul flights

Looking for flights from London to Seoul in November - there are direct flights for £765 ... or single stoppers for just over £300 ... so one stop it is!

All the cheapest flights are with Chinese airlines - which overfly Russia - which can be both a moral and a practical problem.

But if you want to to avoid overflying Russia - the price jumps from around £300 to closer to £600

So I guess that I'll just have to put up with overlying Russia!

At least with the current Visa Free transit policy in China, it should be easy to connect in any of the main airports

There are three main Chinese carriers with good connections from London to Seoul, and whilst you can book using an Online Travel Agent, it's usually better to buy directly with the airline, so let's look at each of them.

Air China has the best website - starting with a good price matrix - and with prices that do actual stay the same after you click through!

The flight selection page is pretty good, with plenty of sort and filter options - including whether you want to fly via PEK or TFU

And then once you've chosen your flights - you get a good summary screen

Next up is China Southern - which starts off with an unimpressive date / price matrix

But then makes up for it with a good flight selection page - including bar graphs above each date to highlight the cheapest options

China Southern quotes the full return price on the outbound selection - and then offers the inbound flights with a "price difference" - which I quite like

With just a handful of flights via PKX and CAN - China Southern has the smallest choice of the three big airlines

And finally we have China Eastern with the strangest website of the big three - which starts off with a warning not to throw objects into the engines!

The pricing matrix isn't overly helpful - you have to click on each option and load the flights in order to generate a price - which sort of defeats the whole idea of a price / date matrix!

And to get a final price for your selected flights you have to enter all your booking details - so you will probably want to make up names / phone numbers / email addresses

And then in my case the price turned out to be quite a bit lower than the price matrix claimed!

So whilst China Eastern has the largest number of flights and the lowest prices - I would probably book them via an Online Travel Agent rather than directly!