How to search properly: getting a real answer out of Kaviqa

Start wider than feels natural

The single most common mistake is searching the trip you already decided on. One origin, one destination, one exact date, and the result confirms what you assumed. A search is only useful if it can surprise you, and that requires giving it room.

Three controls do most of the widening, and none of them cost you anything if the tight answer turns out to be best anyway.

The three controls that matter

1. Date flexibility. The chips under the date fields switch between Exact, +/- 3 and +/- 7. Long-haul premium fares change bucket day to day, so +/- 3 is a sensible default and +/- 7 is worth trying whenever your dates are genuinely soft.
2. Region instead of airport. Under More, set an origin or destination region and pick Anywhere in region. Use this when your real requirement is "somewhere in Japan" rather than one specific airport. Searching the region compares the options against each other instead of assuming you picked the cheap one.
3. Cabin. Set the cabin you actually want before searching rather than filtering afterwards. Economy and business are priced by completely different logic, and a business search is not an economy search with a filter on top.

Reading the result

Every result is shown against a baseline: the cheapest nonstop on your dates in the cabin you asked for. That comparison is the point. A fare is not good because it is a low number, it is good because it beats what you would otherwise have paid for the same journey.

So read results in this order: the gap against the baseline first, then the total journey time, then the itinerary shape. A large gap with a sane connection is the thing worth acting on. A large gap with a four-hour overnight layover in the wrong direction is a number, not a deal.

• Check the cabin on every leg. A headline business-class result can include a shorter economy sector. The itinerary shows this; the price alone does not.
• Check whether it is one ticket or two. It changes who is responsible if a leg is delayed, and that is worth real money.
• Check the total elapsed time, not the number of stops. Two short connections often beat one long one.

Watch a route instead of refreshing it

Premium cabin pricing responds to how full the cabin already is, not to a calendar, so there is no magic booking day to hit. What works is watching a route over time. Save the routes you are serious about and let them accumulate a history: a fare only reads as good once you know what normal looks like on that route.

This is also the honest answer to "when should I book": the question is unanswerable in the abstract and easy once you have watched the route for a few weeks. There is more on that in when to book long-haul business class.

What not to bother with

Clearing cookies, searching in incognito, and using a VPN to look like you are in another country are the three most repeated pieces of flight advice, and all three do far less than people believe. We wrote up what actually changes the price separately, because the reasoning is more useful than the verdict.