Flight search comparison reviews

By Darren Cronian on Saturday, April 5th, 2008

In keeping with the theme of online booking experiences, tonight I road tested seven flight comparison websites with the aim of finding the cheapest flight from Manchester direct to New York, for the 17 – 24 September, for 1 passenger, that’s me.

Here are the reviews..

Kayak

Cheap flight - £397 with Delta airlines
Provider - Cheaptickets.com

Review: For search experience Kayak was my favourite. It has a plain but easy to use interface, and it was the quickest to find flights. I still feel it’s very much US led, and if they were to use more UK based providers then in my opinion it would be the best all-round flight comparison site.

Travel Supermarket

Cheap flight - £387 with Delta airlines
Provider - Major Travel

Review: This site seemed to have a lot more choice than Kayak, and it was interesting to see that the same flight was £10 cheaper through the UK-based Major travel. The downside for me though was the lack of search filters, and it was a little slower than it’s competitors.

Skyscanner

Cheap flight - £433 with British Airways
Provider – British Airways

Review: Not the nicest looking of comparison sites, but it was one of the easiest to search. The downside for me was the lack of choice of only two airlines and no providers like the other comparison websites, which is where you tend to save the most money.

Henoo

Cheap flight - Nothing found
Provider – N/A

Review: Oh noo, I had initial problems when using the calendar to choose my travel dates on the Firefox browser, then when I received the search results I had to click on a provider, which took ages to search and then brought no results back.

Flight Comparison

Cheap flight - £400 with Delta Airlines
Provider – Expedia

Review: I felt like I had been sent back to the 1990s, the design is dreadful, and the search is pretty useless if I have to click a link for each provider to find the prices. I might as well have gone direct to the provider because this site didn’t save me any time or money.

Cheapflights

Cheap flight - £386 with Continental Airlines
Provider - STA Travel

Review: If you have a firm set of dates to travel then the site is not user friendly as you have to click on individual providers to get the prices, but if you are simply looking for the best deals you’ll find them easily. The US version of the site has an improved search, which will hopefully be introduced in the UK soon.

Mobissimo

Cheap flight - £394 with Delta
Provider – Ebookers

Review: It’s lacking content for me, and whilst it provided results from providers none of the others covered, the prices were more expensive. I’d like to see airport guides, more overall information on the flights – it’s not a site that I would hang around for long.

Momondo

Cheap flight - £390 with Continental Airlines
Provider - Opodo

Review: Nice looking site, easy to use search, but could do with some more providers. Results appeared fairly quickly and it comes close to beating Kayak as my favourite flight comparison site, and I will probably use both Kayak and Momondo to compare prices for future flights.

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6 responses to “Flight search comparison reviews”

tom | 5 April, 2008 at 11:51 am

OK but the problem with the Flight Comparison sites is yes they give you what it says on the tin.i.e. cheapest flight. Now look at using human brain- Continental offer a flt for £399.50 BUT it is to Newark which is way cheaper to get into Manhattan (assuming you are not aiming to just lurk around the airport.) My point is that Continental pointed that flight out on their booking system.

Sam Daams | 5 April, 2008 at 1:21 pm

Darren, I can’t believe you didn’t check Momondo.com? Recently won out against kayak et al in press coverage by CNN, Arthur Frommers, and CNBC to name a few…. The press coverage came mostly after Travellerspoint decided to partner with them (not related I think :)). The reason we chose them after rejecting all the others is that they also search airlines they don’t get payment from. So their search is generally much more complete than some of these others!