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A Koozai study in collaboration with SISTRIX
Where do UK travellers actually want to fly and which journeys have us reaching for the metaphorical sofa cushions in search of a cheaper fare?
Koozai, in collaboration with SISTRIX, analysed 3,720 UK Google flight-search keywords to uncover where people want to fly, which routes generate the most demand and where travellers are most actively hunting for cheaper fares.
We compared general flight searches with searches specifically containing “cheap flights”, revealing some striking differences between popularity and price-led search behaviour.
We also analysed SISTRIX search visibility across the same generic flight keyword set to see which airlines, comparison sites and booking platforms are most prominent when people search.
The findings show there isn’t one single UK flight market. Search behaviour changes considerably depending on where people are travelling from, where they’re going and whether finding a lower fare is part of the search itself.
London dominates the highest-volume individual routes, although the destinations themselves are varied.
London to Paris is the most searched route in the dataset, generating an average 9,710 Google searches per month across the tracked generic flight queries.
Amsterdam follows at 8,370, while London to Porto attracts 7,450 searches.
Long-haul travel also makes an appearance near the top. London to Los Angeles generates 5,830 monthly searches, placing it ahead of London to Lisbon, Barcelona, Dubai and New York.
| Rank | Route | Average monthly searches |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | London → Paris | 9,710 |
| 2 | London → Amsterdam | 8,370 |
| 3 | London → Porto | 7,450 |
| 4 | Manchester → Paris | 5,860 |
| 5 | London → Los Angeles | 5,830 |
| 6 | London → Lisbon | 5,400 |
| 7 | London → Barcelona | 5,100 |
| 8 | London → Dubai | 4,560 |
| 9 | London → New York | 4,230 |
| 10 | Manchester → Dublin | 4,050 |
| 11 | London → Dublin | 3,900 |
| 12 | London → Geneva | 3,800 |
| 13 | London → Madrid | 3,440 |
| 14 | Birmingham → Paris | 3,300 |
| 15 | London → Athens | 3,200 |
London’s presence is hardly surprising. What becomes much more interesting is what happens when we stop letting the capital hog the microphone.
Aggregating the tracked routes by destination puts Paris firmly at the top, with 31,880 average monthly searches.
Amsterdam follows with 29,190, while Dublin generates 22,520.
There’s then a sizeable drop to Barcelona at 15,870.
| Rank | Destination | Average monthly searches |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Paris | 31,880 |
| 2 | Amsterdam | 29,190 |
| 3 | Dublin | 22,520 |
| 4 | Barcelona | 15,870 |
| 5 | Alicante | 11,810 |
| 6 | Lisbon | 11,590 |
| 7 | Malaga | 11,460 |
| 8 | Rome | 10,890 |
| 9 | Porto | 10,250 |
| 10 | Geneva | 10,240 |
| 11 | Madrid | 8,550 |
| 12 | Berlin | 8,310 |
| 13 | Tenerife | 7,400 |
| 14 | New York | 6,980 |
| 15 | Dubai | 6,940 |
| 16 | Malta | 6,830 |
| 17 | Milan | 6,790 |
| 18 | Athens | 6,520 |
| 19 | Los Angeles | 6,360 |
| 20 | Faro | 6,160 |
European city breaks dominate, but beach destinations sit comfortably alongside them, while New York, Dubai and Los Angeles bring long-haul routes into the top 20.
London generates 136,020 monthly searches across the generic routes tracked, followed by Manchester at 64,670.
Edinburgh produces 33,790, Bristol 27,510, Glasgow 24,280 and Birmingham 20,050.
But comparing raw totals alone risks missing the interesting bit.
Different parts of the UK search for markedly different destinations.
| Departure point | Most searched destination | Monthly searches |
|---|---|---|
| London | Paris | 9,710 |
| Manchester | Paris | 5,860 |
| Edinburgh | Paris | 2,850 |
| Bristol | Amsterdam | 2,510 |
| Glasgow | Amsterdam | 2,050 |
| Birmingham | Paris | 3,300 |
| Newcastle | Amsterdam | 1,550 |
| Belfast | Malaga | 900 |
| Heathrow | Dublin | 1,710 |
| Liverpool | Paris | 1,200 |
| Gatwick | Geneva | 1,040 |
| Aberdeen | Alicante | 830 |
| Stansted | Porto | 520 |
| Bournemouth | Malta | 990 |
| Leeds | Paris | 800 |
| Cardiff | Amsterdam | 820 |
| Southampton | Amsterdam | 870 |
| Norwich | Amsterdam | 1,070 |
| Exeter | Dublin | 420 |
| Leeds Bradford | Malaga | 630 |
| Southend | Tenerife | 210 |
| Newquay | Dublin | 210 |
| Prestwick | Tenerife | 440 |
| London City | Amsterdam | 120 |
That regional variation gives a rather different picture from a simple national league table.
Paris may win nationally, but Amsterdam repeatedly takes first place outside some of the UK’s biggest departure markets.
It is the most searched destination in the dataset from Bristol, Glasgow, Newcastle, Cardiff, Southampton, Norwich and London City.
Norwich is particularly striking.
Searches from Norwich to Amsterdam reach 1,070 per month, making Amsterdam by far the largest destination in the Norwich data.
Bristol also narrowly prefers Amsterdam to Paris: Amsterdam receives 2,510 monthly searches compared with 2,300 for Paris and 2,160 for Dublin.
Glasgow follows the same pattern, with Amsterdam at 2,050, Alicante at 1,650 and Paris at 1,640.
Belfast produces one of the clearest departures from the national pattern.
Malaga is its most searched destination, attracting 900 monthly searches.
Paris comes next at 870, followed by Amsterdam at 730.
That makes Belfast one of the departure markets where a sunshine destination beats both of the UK’s two most searched destinations overall.
A similar effect appears elsewhere.
Alicante is the leading destination from Aberdeen, while Tenerife leads from Prestwick and Malaga from Leeds Bradford.
European destinations dominate the upper reaches of the data, but long-haul demand is far from insignificant.
London to Los Angeles attracts 5,830 monthly searches, making it the fifth-largest individual route across the entire generic dataset.
London to Dubai generates 4,560, while London to New York receives 4,230.
Across all tracked UK origins, New York attracts 6,980 searches, Dubai 6,940 and Los Angeles 6,360.
Long-haul destinations therefore sit alongside some of Europe’s biggest city-break and holiday markets rather than occupying a completely separate tier of search demand.
General flight demand tells us where people want to go.
The separate SISTRIX cheap-flight dataset lets us ask another question: where are travellers most explicitly looking for a bargain?
Across the 3,720 tracked cheap-flight keywords, the downloaded SISTRIX data records 19,900 average monthly searches.
Amsterdam attracts the greatest combined cheap-flight search demand, followed by Dubai and Dublin.
| Rank | Destination | Cheap-flight searches per month |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Amsterdam | 980 |
| 2 | Dubai | 880 |
| 3 | Dublin | 870 |
| 4 | Alicante | 790 |
| 5 | Barcelona | 760 |
| 6 | Paris | 620 |
| 7 | Ibiza | 560 |
| 8 | Malaga | 550 |
| 9 | Istanbul | 540 |
| 10 | New York | 500 |
| 11 | Malta | 410 |
| 12 | Delhi | 390 |
| 13 | Faro | 390 |
| 14 | Antalya | 370 |
| 15 | Krakow | 300 |
| 15 | Tenerife | 300 |
| 15 | Madrid | 300 |
| 18 | Turkey | 290 |
| 18 | Corfu | 290 |
| 18 | France | 290 |
This ranking is noticeably different from the general-flight table.
Paris falls from first place for overall flight demand to sixth for explicit cheap-flight searches.
Dubai, meanwhile, rises from 15th for overall destination demand to second for cheap-flight searches.
That difference is precisely why looking at price-led searches separately matters.
At individual route level, London to Dubai generates more explicit cheap-flight demand than any other route in the dataset, at 590 average monthly searches.
London to Ibiza follows at 360.
| Rank | Route | Cheap-flight searches per month |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | London → Dubai | 590 |
| 2 | London → Ibiza | 360 |
| 3 | London → Turkey | 260 |
| 4 | Gatwick → Alicante | 250 |
| 5 | London → Istanbul | 240 |
| 6 | London → Warsaw | 210 |
| 7 | London → Delhi | 200 |
| 7 | London → Portugal | 200 |
| 9 | London → New York | 180 |
| 10 | Manchester → Mumbai | 170 |
| 11 | Liverpool → Amsterdam | 160 |
| 11 | Manchester → Dubai | 160 |
| 13 | Luton → Dublin | 140 |
| 14 | Manchester → Paris | 130 |
| 14 | London → Toronto | 130 |
| 14 | London → Madrid | 130 |
Again, the cheap-flight table isn’t simply a miniature version of the general demand ranking.
Price-led search behaviour has its own geography.
Raw cheap-flight volume still favours large departure markets, so Koozai also compared cheap-flight demand with general search demand for the same route.
We call this cheap-search intensity.
It isn’t a percentage of passengers shopping on price, nor does it tell us what people eventually booked. Instead, it compares the monthly search volume attached to the tracked “cheap flights” formulations with the volume attached to the corresponding generic flight formulations.
To avoid tiny routes producing spectacular-looking percentages from very small numbers, the comparison below includes only routes generating at least 500 generic searches per month.
| Route | Generic searches | Cheap-flight searches | Cheap-search intensity |
|---|---|---|---|
| London → Warsaw | 550 | 210 | 38.2% |
| Manchester → Mumbai | 540 | 170 | 31.5% |
| London → Delhi | 650 | 200 | 30.8% |
| London → Ibiza | 1,250 | 360 | 28.8% |
| London → Istanbul | 1,250 | 240 | 19.2% |
| Leeds → Dublin | 580 | 100 | 17.2% |
| Liverpool → Amsterdam | 940 | 160 | 17.0% |
| London → Turkey | 1,530 | 260 | 17.0% |
| Birmingham → France | 710 | 110 | 15.5% |
| Belfast → Amsterdam | 730 | 110 | 15.1% |
| Manchester → Dubai | 1,160 | 160 | 13.8% |
| Manchester → Pisa | 750 | 100 | 13.3% |
| London → Dubai | 4,560 | 590 | 12.9% |
| Newcastle → Barcelona | 620 | 80 | 12.9% |
| London → Mumbai | 800 | 90 | 11.3% |
London to Warsaw stands out most clearly among established routes.
Its 210 monthly cheap-flight searches are equivalent to 38.2% of the volume attached to its 550 generic searches.
Manchester to Mumbai follows at 31.5%, London to Delhi at 30.8% and London to Ibiza at 28.8%.
That contrasts sharply with some of Britain’s biggest routes.
Manchester to Paris, for example, attracts 5,860 generic searches but only 130 cheap-flight searches, which is around 2.2% on the same measure.
London to Barcelona receives 5,100 generic searches and 110 cheap-flight searches, equivalent to around 2.2%.
Popularity and explicit bargain hunting are emphatically not the same thing.
Ibiza provides one of the clearest examples.
Across all origins, Ibiza generates 3,560 generic flight searches but 560 cheap-flight searches.
London alone accounts for 360 of those price-led searches against 1,250 generic searches.
That gives London to Ibiza a cheap-search intensity of 28.8%, considerably above many of the routes with greater overall demand.
Dubai shows a different version of the same phenomenon.
Dubai receives 6,940 generic searches across the dataset and 880 cheap-flight searches. London to Dubai alone accounts for 590 of those cheap-flight searches.
Dubai therefore combines substantial overall demand with unusually substantial explicit interest in cheaper fares.
Looking at destinations rather than individual routes reveals another pattern.
Among destinations generating at least 1,000 generic searches, some produce much more cheap-flight search demand relative to their general popularity than others.
Delhi receives 1,320 generic searches and 390 cheap-flight searches across the tracked origins — equivalent to 29.5% on our cheap-search-intensity measure.
Warsaw records 1,030 generic searches and 250 cheap-flight searches, equivalent to 24.3%.
Corfu reaches 22.5%, Turkey 16.1%, Ibiza 15.4%, Mumbai 15.3% and Larnaca 14.9%.
By contrast, some of the destinations with enormous overall demand generate comparatively little explicit “cheap” search demand.
That doesn’t mean travellers don’t care about price when booking those routes. It simply means they are less likely to include the word “cheap” in the search formulations tracked by this study.
Departure markets differ too.
London naturally generates the largest absolute cheap-flight volume, with 5,770 monthly searches across the tracked routes.
Manchester follows at 2,970, Birmingham at 1,630, Glasgow at 1,300 and Bristol at 1,220.
But comparing those numbers with general flight demand changes the picture.
Birmingham’s 1,630 cheap-flight searches are equivalent to around 8.1% of its 20,050 generic searches.
For London, the equivalent comparison is 4.2%; Manchester 4.6%; Glasgow 5.4%; Bristol 4.4%; Edinburgh 3.2%; and Newcastle 4.2%.
Again, this is a comparison of search-volume datasets rather than a claim about the proportion of travellers motivated by price, but it does suggest that explicit cheap-flight language is more prominent within Birmingham’s tracked search mix.
Where people want to travel is only part of the commercial picture.
SISTRIX also measured which domains have the greatest organic search visibility across the generic flight keyword list.
And one brand is rather difficult to miss.
Skyscanner has a SISTRIX Project Visibility Index of 620.52 across the tracked flight-search list.
That’s around 2.5 times the visibility of Ryanair, the second-highest domain at 249.47.
| Domain | SISTRIX Project Visibility Index | Top 100 rankings | Top 10 rankings |
|---|---|---|---|
| skyscanner.net | 620.52 | 1,458 | 1,458 |
| ryanair.com | 249.47 | 739 | 634 |
| easyjet.com | 216.18 | 795 | 724 |
| google.com | 209.95 | 1,160 | 946 |
| kayak.co.uk | 194.79 | 1,326 | 952 |
| expedia.co.uk | 179.58 | 1,245 | 858 |
| cheapflights.co.uk | 145.09 | 1,191 | 724 |
| klm.co.uk | 144.31 | 746 | 604 |
| momondo.co.uk | 112.12 | 879 | 584 |
| jet2.com | 100.98 | 471 | 408 |
| flightaware.com | 99.39 | 591 | 495 |
| trip.com | 94.35 | 795 | 496 |
| booking.com | 89.58 | 746 | 433 |
| lastminute.com | 79.38 | 803 | 386 |
| britishairways.com | 57.27 | 259 | 224 |
The striking point isn’t simply Skyscanner’s lead.
It’s the mixture of businesses underneath it.
Airlines such as Ryanair, easyJet, KLM, Jet2 and British Airways compete for visibility alongside comparison and booking platforms including Kayak, Expedia, Cheapflights, Momondo, Trip.com, Booking.com and Lastminute.com.
Google itself also appears prominently, with 946 Top 10 rankings across the tracked list.
Flight search isn’t simply a battle between airlines.
The SISTRIX data shows comparison and booking platforms occupying a substantial share of Google’s most prominent results.
Kayak records 952 Top 10 rankings, Expedia 858 and Cheapflights 724.
EasyJet, by comparison, records 724 Top 10 rankings, Ryanair 634 and KLM 604.
This matters because the battle for a traveller doesn’t begin when they arrive on an airline’s website.
It starts considerably earlier, when someone types a route into Google and decides which result deserves the next click.
Comparison sites have made themselves very difficult to avoid at precisely that moment.
Airlines and comparison sites aren’t the only organisations appearing across these searches.
Airport websites also feature within the SISTRIX competition data.
Manchester Airport has a Project Visibility Index of 33.56, Stansted 20.95 and Newcastle Airport 20.46.
Bournemouth Airport records 11.40, London Luton 10.08, Glasgow Airport 8.59, Cardiff Airport 7.46, Heathrow 6.06, Southampton 5.85, Edinburgh Airport 5.21 and Norwich Airport 4.29.
Airport websites therefore form another layer of competition around route searches, particularly where they provide useful information about destinations and flights available from their terminals.
Taken together, the data suggests that there isn’t one UK flight market.
Search behaviour changes according to departure point, destination and whether the traveller is explicitly hunting for a lower fare.
For travel brands, that makes understanding individual routes rather more useful than assuming the whole country wants exactly the same thing.
This research also establishes a useful benchmark for the next stage of the study.
SISTRIX’s competition data shows which brands and websites currently have the greatest visibility across traditional Google search results for these flight queries.
The same routes can now be tested through conversational questions such as:
“Where can I book a flight from London to Paris?”
“What airlines fly from Manchester to Barcelona?”
“What’s the cheapest way to fly from London to Dubai?”
“Where can I find cheap flights from Glasgow to Amsterdam?”
That would allow Koozai and SISTRIX to compare traditional search visibility with AI mentions and citations.
The interesting question isn’t simply which travel brands appear in AI answers.
It’s whether the organisations dominating Google are also the organisations that AI systems choose to mention and cite.
That comparison could expose brands with high traditional search visibility but limited AI presence, as well as businesses that appear disproportionately often in AI responses despite having lower organic visibility.
For now, the Google data provides the baseline.
The UK Flight Demand Report 2026 was produced by Koozai in collaboration with SISTRIX.
Koozai analysed two SISTRIX keyword datasets supplied for the research.
The first contains 3,720 UK Google keywords covering generic flight searches. The downloaded keyword export contains a combined 392,320 average monthly searches.
The second contains the corresponding 3,720 UK “cheap flights” keywords, with a combined 19,900 average monthly searches in the downloaded export.
Keywords were grouped by their stated UK departure point and destination. Different tracked phrasings relating to the same origin/destination combination were combined to produce route-level figures.
Search volume represents average monthly Google search demand reported by SISTRIX. Figures measure searches, not unique people, passengers, bookings, ticket sales or revenue.
Country-level destinations such as “Turkey”, “Portugal” and “France” have been retained as separate search destinations because that is how users expressed those queries. They have not been combined with individual cities within those countries.
City-level and airport-level origins have also been retained separately. For example, “London”, “Heathrow”, “Gatwick”, “Stansted”, “Luton” and “London City” are not combined, because they represent different queries within the supplied dataset.
Cheap-search intensity is calculated by dividing aggregated search volume for the tracked cheap-flight formulations of a route by aggregated search volume for its corresponding generic-flight formulations. It is intended as a comparative search-demand measure and should not be interpreted as the percentage of travellers who choose flights based on price.
The cheap-search-intensity route table applies a minimum threshold of 500 average monthly generic searches to reduce distortions caused by very small underlying route volumes.
Organic visibility findings use the SISTRIX Project Visibility Index and Top 100/Top 10 ranking data supplied for the generic flight keyword list.
Data source: SISTRIX. Analysis: Koozai.
Koozai is a UK digital marketing agency specialising in SEO, AI search, digital PR, content and paid media.
The agency works with businesses to understand how people discover, evaluate and choose brands across search and digital channels.
SISTRIX provides search and digital market intelligence, including keyword, competitor and organic visibility data.
SISTRIX supplied the keyword-demand and search-visibility data used within this research.