A guide to travel meta search

By Darren Cronian on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

Firstly, let’s get the geeky stuff out of the way - meta search is an application that takes a search query and queries data from a travel companies servers, then aggregates the results on a website. This means that as a consumer you don’t have to spend time jumping from site to site to find a flight, hotel, package holiday etc.

You’ll also hear the term ‘travel or flight comparison’ but in my non-technical eyes, they are all the same because of the way in that they work, i.e. grabbing data and aggregating it on the website. A question I’d like to ask the travel professionals reading this; are travel meta search engines a threat to Google? – I think they are.

List of Travel meta search sites

• Bezurk
• Cheapflights
• Fare Chase
• Hotels Combined
• Kayak
• Momondo
• Travel Supermarket
• SideStep [now only available in the US]

Please leave examples of other travel meta search sites in the comments.

I’d like to see more meta search sites specialising in package holidays, so rather than consumers visiting their favourite travel brands, they can search smaller independent travel agents too. 2008 is going to be an interesting year with Kayak already buying out SideStep and reports today on Travolution that Rupert Murdock’s empire have bought shares in Bezurk.

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9 responses to “A guide to travel meta search”

Sam Daams | 15 January, 2008 at 9:45 pm

Hey Darren, check out momondo.com . Great site! In fact, Frommers ran three tests on them and they came up with the best price EVERY time!! The reason? They will add all airlines, not just the ones that pay them a commission….

Darren Cronian | 16 January, 2008 at 12:22 am

Sam, yep I like Momondo.

I featured them a while back;
http://www.travel-rants.com/2006/11/01/introducing-momondo-european-flight-search-engine/

Karen Bryan | 17 January, 2008 at 5:21 pm

I’ve used
htttp://www.hotelscombined.com
often to compare hotel prices, they search around 30 accommodation suppliers to find the best price for you. They have delivered a good choice of hotels at low prices.

Darren Cronian | 19 January, 2008 at 4:36 am

Karen, that’s an amazing hotel site. Will use that in future. Thanks.

Rohan | 21 January, 2008 at 1:23 pm

I love the Kayak site. I found it easy to use and found some great deals for Christmas to New York.

Nomadic Ostrich | 21 January, 2008 at 4:24 pm

meta searches are the future. we are revamping our website at the moment, to accommodate for this trend. but there is some serious code fiddling to do, as to accommodate for different suppliers. and gosh, don’t they like to take things slowly…

Guillaume | 24 January, 2008 at 7:41 am

Hi Darren,

Dohop.com is another meta search engine founded in Iceland. And you also have Sprice.com founded in Singapore. VibeAgent is also a meta search engine for Hotels.

Cheers.

Guillaume

Darren Cronian | 24 January, 2008 at 1:32 pm

Thanks Guillaume, I’ll check them out.