SOTW: Finesse your flight search with ITA

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Site of the Week (SOTW) is where I delve into my bookmarks to bring you the key websites you need to be a smarter traveller. Some will save you money, some, time and some will make life easier. All of them are tried and tested gems which I use daily when planning my travel.

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A few weeks ago, my friend Sean was planning his mid-life crisis. No, not a motorbike, but a final voyage into the wilderness before he stopped having a pregnant wife and started having a child.

Such trips, of course, need to be made to far-off destinations which are difficult to get to cheaply - especially if you start from here. It's one thing finding a cheap flight to the Costa Brava, but quite another to get yourself to Ulan Bator. Plugging in NCL and ULN (yes, I did have to look the ICAO code up) into Expedia simply wasn't going to hack it.

I gently nudged Sean towards one of my favourite flight-search websites. "You know it's serious," he said, "when it doesn't have any W's in it". He's right. Just take a look at the URL: http://matrix.itasoftware.com/. Doesn't that just scream Raw Power at you?

ITA Software is the engine behind the Orbitz travel agency, among others. It doesn't sell you tickets directly, but it whirrs and crunches away to find a huge number of results, and it has one of the most powerful search interfaces you can find. The query language takes a bit of getting used-to, but I think you'll find it's worth it in the end.

As for how to use it ... if a picture's worth a thousand words, then a video must be close to a small novel (works best in full-screen mode):

Capture your screen in seconds

Once you've found the flights you want, it's time to input the details into Kayak, or any other online travel agency. You can even print out the 'show booking details' page for your local travel agency.