Airfare aggregators and meta-search engines

Let an aggregator automatically search all the booking engines, airline sites, travel agencies, and airfare discounters in the blink of an eye

For more info:
www.momondo.com
www.vayama.comLink
www.cheapflights.comCheap Flights
www.kayak.comPartner
www.mobissimo.com
www.dohop.com
www.fly.com
matrix.itasoftware.com





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Let me be blunt. If I could check only one kind of website before booking an airfare, it would be an aggregator. I could quite happily then proceed to book my plane tickets knowing that there is only the smallest chance a better fare is out there. (Well, OK, I would want a chance to check the consolidators as well first.)

When looking into buying plane tickets on the Internet, you probably do what most people do: check one or more of the famous search engines and booking sites—Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity —then pick the best price you can find and book the tickets. Congratulations. Chances are pretty strong that you just overpaid for your airfare.

While the three big booking engines often do offer excellent fares—sometimes, indeed, the best available out there—there are other booking engines—both smaller ones and foreign ones that aren't as well marketed to the U.S. audience —not to mention many consolidators (wholesalers), airfare discounters, and online travel agencies, all of which might very well have even lower fares.

If nothing else, the big three booking engines always charge you a modest fee—just $5 to $10 (and, during the doldrums of the 2008/09 economic slump, some began waiving even that), but still…

So how do you search not only Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity but also all of those other sites as well? You use a kind of automated personal shopper called an aggregator.

Enter the aggregators

Reid's shortcut to the best fares
All of the airfare hunting techniques mentioned on this site have merit, but, honestly, if I had to narrow it down to three crucial places to check, they would be:

1) The low-cost carrier euroflyEurofly
2) The aggregator Momondo
3) The consolidator AutoEurope

Nine times out of ten, I end up booking my plane tickets to Italy through one of those methods.Price aggregators—also known as "meta–search engines," since they search the search engines for you—are a different breed of web critter. These Web sites are looking to preempt all the big search engine bookers (Orbitzpartner, Expediapartner, and Travelocity) by batch-searching most of the airfare sales sites for you, directly and all at once (well, it might take 10 or 20 seconds).

Most aggregators will run your itinerary through dozens upon dozens of cheap fare sites, individual airline Web sites (not just the major airlines, but smaller carriers and low-cost airlines ones as well), discounters, consolidators, and traditional travel agencies and come up with their answers. This saves you the hassle of opening up a dozen browser windows and keep clicking back and forth through them all, sifting for the best prices.

In other words, aggregators will tell you know only the going rates at the Big Three, but also survey the majority of all the other prices available out there.

They aren't perfect, of course. One drawback to meta-searching—and to the big search engine bookers, for that matter—is that many times an individual airline will have a special sale going on, or its Web site features an option that lets you be fuzzier about departure and arrival times and dates. Either of those situations may generate much lower fares than the sort of straight search most meta-search engines (or booking sites) performs.

The bots at KayakPartner and company are always getting smarter about figuring that sort of thing out for you—but they're not yet perfect. So use these resources at your own risk. they can be a good way to sort through and compare all the sites with ease, but you may miss that incredibly cheap needle when you're looking at the whole haystack at once.

Meet the Airfare Aggregators

PartnerMomondo.com (www.momondo.com) - This new entry (as of 2007) from, of all places, Denmark has quietly blown most of the other aggregators out of the water. It searches more than 600 airline sites, booking engines, search engines, travel agencies, etc.—which is two to three times as many sources as the competition. It also includes in its searches Southwest (whcih no one else does), and—in Europe—the rail options so you can easily compare the time/cost benefit of train versus plane.

I ran Momondo through some tests, and the extra work they do really seems to pay off, as it almost always found the lowest available fares on domestic, Transatlantic, and inter-European flights. It found fares from carriers none of the others did, and when it did find the same flights as some of the competition, it invariably managed to find a lower price for it. For now, at least, I'm calling it: Momondo is the single best resource out there, bar none. (Still, I always shop around and run my proposed itineraries through Orbitz and the others, just in case.)

Another nice Momondo.com feature is the “Flexible Dates” option. Instead of returning a standard list of results for your specific travel dates, it gives you two graphs, one for the departure month the other for the return, showing you the peaks and troughs of the lowest fare available on each day of that month. Mouse over one of these graph columns for any given day and it will display the actual price, source of that fare, and flight times. Click on the dates you desire and you can then switch back to the regular search feature. Nice.

Kayak (www.kayak.comPartner) - Currently the most famous in the aggregator game, with perhaps the easiest and simplest interface. It abounds in clever touches, like automatically popping up a window showing a month's-worth of alternative travel dates to those you entered so you can instantly see the savings you could accrue just by leaving or returning a few days earlier or later. It doesn't have as many visible bells as whistles as some of the others, but seems to have one of the more powerful engines under the hood.

Still, Kayak.com doesn't canvas quite as many sites as Momondo, and it favors sites that pay it a higher commission. Also, in 2011 it got into bed with Microsoft's bing and then immediately started offering direct trip booking via a relationship with Travelocity, so it's far from a pure aggregator anymore. Still, none of that means I wouldn't take two minutes to check it along with the others when researchign fares.

PartnerCheapFlights (www.cheapflights.com) - Finally, this great U.K. resource has come to the U.S. It's not a booking engine; you just get the best price results from dozens of airlines and booking engines out there, then surf over to the source's own Web site to book the thing. But you do get a great overview of all the prices you might pay for a particular route.

You put in your destination (domestic or international), then your departure airport, and it quickly comes up with a list of all the fares out there, from the big search engines (Travelocity and such) to the major airlines to the U.S.-based no-frills guys (like jetBlue), to consolidator fares. Course, many of these prices are limited-availability deals, like e-savers, and it does put sponsored fares up top (one or two only, usually), which won't necessarily be the cheapest, but since the service is free we can forgive them this modest commercial plug.

PartnerVayama.com (www.vayama.comLink) - Only does international fares, and claims access to airfares unavailable to the general public. It has come out the price champ on a few searches, so it always pays to check.

PartnerDoHop.com (www.dohop.com) - This is also a good aggregator service, and one of the few that puts a primium on including low cost airlines in its results. This seems to me like a no-braininer way to ensure you'll get the lowest fares, but for some reason only Momondo seems to agree. I believe it presents a much thornier tech challenge to include them all—and lower profit margins to the aggregator—so perhaps that's why. Still, for the consumer like you and me, this is crucial.

Mobissimo.com (www.mobissimo.com) - Another excellent aggregator.

Fly.com (www.fly.com) - A new aggregator fielded by the folks at Travelzoo.comTravelzoo (an excellent travel deals newsletter).

IATA (matrix.itasoftware.com) - This is the original airfare booking engine, the one long used by travel agents. It's now available to the general public (log in as a guest). While not nearly as user-friendly as the for-public-consumption sites above, IATA will link together interesting cities using rival carriers to create route options that other search engines miss.

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This material was last updated April 2011. All information was accurate at the time.

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