As with any unfamiliar company, always do a quick BBB.org check and a complaints search for red flags. Some of the booking sites these aggregators show you are better than others.

And then there are aggregators-sites that do not book tickets but instead search dozens of booking engines, airfare sites, and OTAs (online travel agencies) and compile the results in one place you then click through to the one of your choice to make the actual purchase. There are booking engines that find prices themselves (Expedia, Priceline, Hotwire).

An aggregator is only as good as the OTAs it canvasses.

There are a few things to keep in mind before you search. Fares within 1% of one another were considered equal. Airlines may think that makes for a viable plan, but we don’t.įinally, we used a complicated, weighted scoring system for each search that rewarded two points to any site that found the best fares, one point for second-best, nothing for average results, a negative point for high prices, and minus two for the sites that returned the worst fares. We also ignored any itinerary that would be hell to fly-basically anything increasing total travel time by more than half through excessively long layovers, too many stops, or flying way out of your way just to change planes. We threw in a curve ball (Denver to New Delhi) and included a flight with no North American legs (London to Barcelona) to see how well each handled Europe‘s Wild West of low-cost carriers. We covered major gateways (NYC to LAX, Miami to Rio) and secondary ones (Philly to Rome). We tested the remaining 16 sites on both last-minute flights (leaving the following weekend) and APEX fares (booked six weeks out).

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