Cheap Airfare Step 1: Search Engines & Fare Aggregators

Let your computer mouse do the walking and these Web sites—Orbitz, Travelocity, Kayak and the like—do the heavy lifting in comparing all the going rates at major airlines while you sit back and sip your cocoa

You know what I'm talking about here: Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity, and their ilk. Search engines comb the Web sites of airlines and various budget travel agencies to find the current fares for destinations. Most also throw in hotel booking and car-rental engines.

Using them is usually more of a time-saving technique than one that will get you the absolute lowest price possible, which I almost invariably get by going to the individual airline's Web sites themselves. Though occasionally I've ended up booking directly through a search engine site (usually for domestic flights, where they seem to be best at pinning down the cheapest options), I find they are best for getting an overview of which airlines service the routes I want and a rough idea of their relative prices.

On occasion, I actually have discovered the absolute best price through a search engine, and since the booking site where that happens most regularly (in my experience) is Orbitz, I've gone ahead and provided a direct booking window for Orbitz on the pages in this site (bottom right corner) to help save you time. Still, I urge you to check them all before buying; you never know.

It should be said that these booking engines sometimes enter into special licensing/promotional agreements with individual airlines. Such agreements lead them periodically to ignore cheaper fares posted by competitors when their own partners are running a special, or result in their refusing to list fares for an airline that won't pay a commission.

In a few cases it's the smaller airlines that have refused to be listed on these Web reseller sites (they've all been accused of one or more of these practices by various airlines, and in fact Congress is currently investigating some of these sites).

The Search-Engine Search Engines—Airfare Aggregators

Metasearch engines, also known as price aggregators, are a different breed of web critter. These Web sites are looking to preempt all the big search engine bookers (Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity) by batch-searching most of the airlines directly for you, all at once. Most will run your itinerary through the many cheap fare sites and airline Web sites and come up with their answers, saving you from having to open up a dozen browser windows and keep clicking back and forth through them all.

The drawback to metasearching—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.

As of yet the bots at Kayak and Sidestep and such aren't always smart enough to figure that sort of thing out for you—though CheapFlights.com seems to have a handle on it. 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 Search Engines

Orbitz

(www.orbitz.com) - When the big airlines saw how much business Web sites such as Expedia and Travelocity were doing, they decided they could cut out these middlemen. American, Continental, Delta, Northwest, and United banded together to launch their own site in 2001, though now it's run independently of its founders.

It lists some 40 affiliates, covering many of the world's major airlines, and claims its search engine culls results from more than 445 different airlines. It also boasts a "matrix" search system which allows you to be as fuzzy as you want with departure dates and such and set your own priorities to find the cheapest fare (bascially, it shows you on a single page, in a grid, what the price would be going or returning 1-2 days earlier or later).

Travelocity

(www.travelocity.com) - This was one of the first Big Boys on the Web travel market, an offshoot of that old travel agent's best friend, the Sabre reservations system. It remains one of the best search engines trawling the Web for discounted airfares—though, as with its competitor Expedia, it's usually limited to fares offered to the general public by the airlines themselves (saves a lot of phone calls, though).

Expedia

(www.expedia.com) - Microsoft's foray into travel, a search engine for the discounted fares currently offered by a number of airlines. You'll have to fiddle with the dates a bit (i.e.: putting a day earlier or later and submitting a search again) to find lowest fare. Of all the biggies, I find that Expedia usually manages to return the best fares, especially domestically.

Meet the Airfare Aggregators

Momondo.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. I ran it through some tests, and the extra work they do really seems to pay off, as if invariably 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 Kayak, 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.

Kayak

(www.kayak.com) - The newest player in the aggregator game seems to have the best model and the easiest interface, but as of this writing it's too soon to tell how well it will work out once it gets out of beta-testing and onto your Web browser.

Qixo

(www.qixo.com) - A Web-based metsearch engine that culls through 28 sites to dig up the best fares from each. One of the first aggregators around, but really starting to show its age, as newer competitioors feature more bells and whistles to help you make the right cheapest choice.

CheapFlights

(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.

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

Sidestep

(www.sidestep.com) - The more effective version of this metasearcher is a download that only works on PCs (not Macs), though there is now a limited Web-based version available.

Step 2: MajoR Airlines >>