A direct return to Las Vegas cost £433 when Which? searched, against an average fare of £709 a year earlier. The saving came from the travel date.

Hotel towers along the Las Vegas Strip under a clear sky, with traffic on Las Vegas Boulevard in the foreground.
Image: Dietmar Rabich more
The Strip, Las Vegas, in 2012.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Which? found a direct return to Las Vegas with Norse Airlines for £433 in November 2024, flying out on 31 December and back on 7 January. That was against an average Las Vegas fare of £709 the year before. Flying out three days earlier, on 28 December, cost £560 more for the same trip. Which? also flagged 20 December as the date to avoid, since it was both the busiest and the most expensive day to fly outside Europe over the Christmas period.

Why the same seat has many prices

Many airlines now set fares with dynamic pricing, a model hotels also use, so two travellers can pay different amounts for seats on the same flight. Fares also move with demand overall, and airfare in January 2025 started about 12% higher than a year earlier, according to a report from the price-tracking firm Hopper. Prices were expected to stay above 2023 and 2024 levels until at least the middle of the year.

A handful of named tools track that movement. Hopper predicts whether a fare is likely to rise or fall, and Julian Kheel, founder of the browser extension Points Path, calls it “the gold standard” for the job. For a fee, Hopper’s price freeze feature covers the gap if a fare rises before you buy, and passes on the saving if it falls instead. Going, formerly known as Scott’s Cheap Flights, emails deals to members, and a company spokesperson told Condé Nast Traveler that its free tier saves users about $350 per round trip on average. Expedia’s Flight Deals feature, launched in February 2025, filters deals by home airport and finds fares at least 20% below the typical estimate for a route. Google Flights upgraded its price prediction with a feature backed by trend data in the summer of 2023, and emails an alert when a tracked route drops.

What a Vegas seat costs from the West Coast

A search on KAYAK lists one-way fares into Las Vegas starting at $44 from Los Angeles, $48 from San Diego, $49 from Phoenix, $50 from San Francisco, and $52 from Denver. Those sit in the same low range as the page’s cheapest domestic pairs, such as Phoenix to Los Angeles at $40. Flying out of Las Vegas costs about the same in reverse: $45 to Los Angeles, $55 to Phoenix.

None of that is a guarantee for the day you search.