I’ve been doing a bit of research this past week on flights for some upcoming travel and decided to spend some time checking out the meta search engines. These are the booking sites that provide aggregated information on the best prices on flights, hotels, tour packages and car rentals.
For my purposes, I only searched for flight information and here’s what I’ve determined:
Bing.com/travel (formerly Farecast) – Excellent interface. It uses a predictive model to suggest how a traveler should proceed (wait to book, buy now, etc.) based on the history of prices going up or down. You can set up an alert by simply entering your email address and a password. Site is super fast in its searches and page load time. While it has the ability to search multi-city fares, there’s no predictive model for it with regards to pricing.
While the fare predictions are a totally cool feature, I haven’t had much luck with it, yet. The couple of times I’ve paid attention to this and their confidence rating has been about 60% that prices will go down, the prices have actually gone up. At that rate, I’m more likely to book a flight immediately if I might only save $20-$50. Experience has taught me that the closer you get to your departure date, the less likely costs will drop.
Yapta – Good search engine and it provides the opportunity for the user to be alerted to drops in fares. It’s missing the predictive analysis that Bing Travel includes, however. Not sure if it matters if my own confidence level is low (as it is on Bing) that the predictions are accurate. Overall, I find the user interface not quite as user friendly as Bing Travel – the print is small and my options aren’t as obvious.
Vayama – I used to love Vayama because they specialize in international fares. But in just having done a search, it seems they’ve confused the situation for users (at least this user). After clicking on my search request, pop up boxes appeared in which I had to confirm the information I already entered. Then, new windows opened for other booking engines including BookingBuddy. While the search on Vayama actually gave me some cheap options for flights to India ($100 cheaper than what I booked it for a few weeks ago), I ended up a confused user given that other booking options popped up from other companies.
Overall, the user interface was not so friendly (why is it that sites insist on making their font so small these days?).
Voyij – This site aggregates deals from hundreds of sites to provide sales and promotional opportunities from your destination. I wouldn’t have thought this information was so valuable until I had a question from an audience member during a talk I gave a couple of weeks ago. A gal asked if there was a site that allowed a person to search for deals based on dates rather than destinations. Because I generally have a target destination and then figure out when I can go, this type of search hadn’t occurred to me. But here it is… I now know that I can get to San Francisco from Seattle for $119 the weekend of September 11th.
Trip.com – These folks launched just a couple of weeks ago as a division of Away.com. It makes sense that they are offering a booking engine as part of their bigger brand but I’m not sure that they are offering anything that sets them apart from the other meta search engines.
*****
At this time, I can’t say that I’m actually brand loyal to any of the above. I will probably continue to check each one of these sites to find the best deal and I then might even book directly on the airline’s website (doing so might provide me with a bit better customer service in the case of a canceled or delayed flight).
Travel Well,
Beth
Related links:
What Makes a Travel Hotspot?
Unplugging While Traveling
Airport Safety = Security Theater?
Pretty Young Thang
Medical Tourism: Dental Work in Bangkok
Understanding Travel Insurance
How Not to be a Trashy Tourist
Peter says
Another one you might be interested in is Momondo. They seem to handle a lot of the budget airlines better than the others, particularly European based.
And if you’re looking for airfares in and out of Australia, Adioso.com is worth looking at too. A totally different take on airfare search which is actually probably the way it should be.
Nora says
Great list! I also enjoy using Which Budget to find budget carriers that are regularly missed by the bigger search engines:
http://www.whichbudget.com/en/
Wego says
You might be interested in try out Wego.com. We have a huge coverage for Asian destinations and power some of the major Asian portals travel verticals
Vera Marie Badertscher says
Shortcuts have never worked well for me. I always get the best deals from the airline sites themselves. Yes, I sometimes look at one of them to get a feel for fares, but then the airline sites will have something more recent and with more choices of flights.
Shelly (Travels with Baby) says
I’ve been pretty happy with Kayak.com as a starting point. One thing I’ve found extremely annoying lately is the way different engines handle the extra taxes and fees–and at what point they reveal those to what they’re showing you as they’re incredible airfare. I found a great $400 ticket with one company, only to discover they somehow had $466 extra fees to add to that before purchase. It was cheaper to buy the same fare elsewhere, though it showed a higher initial fare.
vayama team says
Hi Beth,
We’re concerned about losing your love and want to assure you that we haven’t made any major changes to the vayama site. Our front page is designed so that you can enter your search data and have your itinerary and fare options quickly displayed.
We have asked our tech team to explore what might have caused the page requesting that you reconfirm your already entered information. This is not the norm. There is a minimalized pop-under window for BookingBuddy that we offer as an alternative search tool if you can not find an itinerary that fits your needs with vayama. But it only displays when the user maximizes the window.
Regards,
The vayama team
Cherrye at My Bella Vita says
Like you, I use a combination of sites to track down the best price. I, too, like Kayak. I’ve also found the best flight combos/prices on my last three flights on cheaptickets.com.
wandermom says
Have you checked http://www.skyscanner.net/? I’ve found this good for searching for fares – especially in Europe.
The Longest Way Home says
Nice list. I’m with wandermom above. Skyscanner.net is pretty good for all round searches.
And well done to get vayama to comment on here!
Beth says
@Peter – thanks for the tip on Momondo, I wasn’t aware of it. And to @WanderMom and @The Longest Way Home re: Skyscanner.net – also new to me.
@Shelley – it is frustrating that everyone uses different methods for calculating fees but it’s probably done on purpose. Hidden fees and all.
@Vayama – thanks for checking in. I’ll definitely try you folks again to see if I have a better experience next time.
xki says
Momondo is soon launching its new site!
Mary @ Green Global Travel says
Thank you for putting together such an amazing list and with so much information on each option You have actually introduced to new travel fare search engines!