Find A Cheap Flight
Find A Cheap Flight from Cheap Flights
How is it possible that a ticket prices for a same flight and seat can show such massive differences? The reason for this goes back to the 80's, when American Airlines created a new dynamic pricing system defined as Revenue Management. Academics defined it as the process of understanding, anticipating and influencing consumer behavior in order to maximize revenue from a perishable resource. In plain words, airlines tried to find the way to fill their planes up to the last seat by selling the each individual seat to the highest possible price each client was willing to pay at a given moment in time.
In a world without internet where price transparency was limited and clients heavily relied on traditional travel agencies, this new system worked just fine for the industry. And then Internet grew into the biggest world platform, capable of processing amounts of data never ever handled before and presenting it to the final customer in a clear and simple way. The airline industry with its massive data processing requirements to handle the dynamic pricing of millions of flights saw how the Web became the ideal platform to channel this information directly to the client - giving the people back the power of information.
Meta search engines - too good to be true?
With the ongoing increase in data processing power, a new type of travel sites called Meta search engines or shopbots have popped up promising to bring order in the online chaos of airline prices. Despite their striking similarity to online travel agencies, their business model is purely based on advertising revenue or referral fees. Via XML feeds or simple screen-scrapping techniques they bundle flight prices from different web sources into one single result page. Once you click on your preferred choice you will be sent to the supplier website (usually airline sites or online travel agencies) that handles the payment and fulfillment of the booking.
Meta search players made a big splash during the web 2.0 boom led by the US player Kayak.com and industry experts were quick in announcing the death of the online travel agencies, squeezed between Meta search players and airlines. This scenario is far from reality, since Meta search engines are keen to integrate as much advertisers as possible, heavily relying on the content of online travel agencies to widen its offering and advertisement opportunities.
Are the Meta search flight engines the best option to find your cheapest flight? Not necessarily, since there are 2 major problems you need to know:
Choice: as with any advertisement platform, meta search players are only interested in displaying the content they get paid for. The bigger meta search sites become, the more they charge to airlines and travel agencies, shying away players with competitive flight prices. No Meta search site currently offers a 100% accurate picture of the best available flight prices.
Price Accuracy: To be able to process millions of flight prices from different, Meta search players rely on new applications (Ajax) and data storing technologies to be capable to come back in a fraction of a second with hundreds of fares to your search. But the trade off for this speed is a small delay of fare updates which means that prices displayed on these engines are sometimes distorted or simply wrong.
Meta search engines can nevertheless be a good starting point to avoid the hassle of running searches on several websites, if you follow the following guidelines:
Always use a local meta search engine from where you are flying from. A US meta search engine will never give you the right fare for flights from a Beijing to Bangkok!
Check the quantity and quality of the sites that are being sourced. Some do only scan online travel agencies, (i.e. Farecompare in the US or Travelsupermarket in UK), so you can miss a better fare on the airline site. Some will only show mainly airline sites (i.e. Kayak), potentially missing some better bargains from online travel agencies.
In the USA, the two biggest online travel agencies, Expedia and Travelocity deliberately do not to work with any meta search engines.Priceline and Hotwire, the only agencies guaranteeing no booking fees on published fares are also rarely present in meta search engines.
The biggest US players in meta search are Kayak, Sidestep (now part of Kayak), Mobissimo and Farechase. The differences between them are mostly limited to design and some fancy web 2.0 functionalities, but the sourcing of suppliers is broadly the same. If you want to make sure you also compare prices of a major low cost carrier such as Southwest Airlines, try out a less well known player such as Momondo.
A new breed of meta search engines have appeared in the last years trying to separate themselves from the crowd by offering a unique customer proposition. None of them provide any significant improvement in terms of breath and depth of supplier sourcing, but a few provide some interesting new functionalities:
www.farecast.com: promises to give you some insight on how air fares will evolve making sure you buy your ticket at the right moment in time
www.yapta.com: tracks the fares you are searching even after you purchased your ticket, claiming to support you for an airline refund if price drops below what you paid
www.insidetrip.com: tries to add the quality component into your flight search by comparing 12 quality elements of each flight offer on top of the price
In Europe, the market is more fragmented. The key players are Kelkoo on a Paneuropean level, www.travelsupermarket.com in the UK and www.easyvol.fr in France. Check out some less well known sites such as www.momondo.com, www.sprice.com and www.liligo.com that are present in severaly countries and offer a wider choice.
Make sure you don't miss out the huge offer of Low Cost Carrriers in Europe using a search engine dedicated to Low Cost Carriers such as www.wegolo.com and www.skyscanner.net.
Asia is quickly catching up in meta search sites. The most popular sites are www.wego.com and www.sprice.com, but India is quickly becoming populated with new players such as www.ixigo.com and www.zoomtra.com. [To read the full article, please click here.]