INTERNET tools that compare air fares from several no-frills airlines are enabling web-savvy business travellers to find cheaper fares.

Low-cost airlines accounted for 20 per cent of business travel flights last year, according to the travel management company Carlson Wagonlit, which says their influence is growing.

Firms are also encouraging staff to find the best deals and book tickets themselves on simple journeys served by low-cost airlines — hence the emergence of new internet tools.

SkyScanner is one of the most innovative of these. It allows travellers to find the three cheapest flights each day on a specified route for a particular month. Flights from easyJet, buzz, Ryanair and others are included side by side.

SkyScanner works by regularly scanning airline websites for fares and collating them in a database. This means the price information is not live and the ticket may have gone by the time of booking but on all the fares we tested the flights were still available.

A less visually attractive tool is offered by Aerfares, which covers most no-frills airlines including the recent launches Air Berlin, Germanwings and Jet2. Ryanair is an obvious omission. Search options include mystery tickets for specified dates, a similar tool to SkyScanner’s weekend break finder.

The advantage over SkyScanner is that Aerfares is able to include taxes in the fares it shows. For our test weekend, it came up with a trip from Luton to Cologne for £25.98 return including taxes on Hapag-Lloyd Express.

Surprisingly, perhaps, no-frills airlines are not concerned about their information being downloaded into such systems. In fact, easyJet’s parent group has its own flight-finder website, called easyValue. This allows you to compare prices on 57 airlines, including buzz, Ryanair and Virgin Express, as well as traditional airlines.

SkyScanner (www.skyscanner.net ); Aerfares (www.aerfares.net ); easyValue (www.easyvalue.com ).