I would have thought that with Google entering the market, that would be enough to put anyone off starting “yet another” flight comparison site ?!

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There have been too many flight comparisons for the past two years already… I can’t really understand why anyone would want to start one after say 01/01/2009… but hey, the lure of doing what everyone else is doing has always been appealing to many an executive with a lack of creativity and shareholders pushing them to come up with something ‘new’.

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i’d like to see a flight comparison site that really works – i’ve actually always done better than the comparison sites – although i do use them for the initial query – to find out who’s now doing offers on a particular route.
what really gets me is often when you click on a fare – it often magically disappears or is available for different dates even though you put the date in before searching.
fare rules are also not often as clear as they might be when you use comparison sites – they give you letters and then you’re not really sure if its a fair you can amend for a fee if you need to.
when i can’t get the best fare direct from an airline or the route is tight on space or deals i’ve found my best deals have come from the old fashioned ‘dial-up’ a travel agent.
so i’m still waiting for the definitive comparison site.

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The worse thing about these comparison sites is the mistakes or routings they give. I seen connection times of 20 minutes between 2 airports in the same city (not possible) and Murray quoted one on twitter today of Dublin to Brussels taking 18 hours to save a few quid.. Instead of 1 hour 5 minutes. Thing is once booked if it goes wrong your on your own.

The market is crowded and needs better systems if it possible. Like for like would be good instead of telling me Ryanair is £62 and BA is £120, when you go all the way though Ryanair is £140 and BA is still £120.

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Yeah. I agree. Basically, I get confused. There’s always loads of information on these things but absolutely no real way of finding the information that you want in a very quick format. I get incredibly confused and irritated by these sites and so, yes, I feel that there should be some kind of streaming system on them. Not very likely that it will happen however.

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OK, I am biased, but I don’t believe in price comparison engines. As Nick says, there is a problem with routing (no, I don’t want to fly to Heathrow, just to connect via Luton the next day), but also with the concept of “price comparison”.

Before you can compare like for like, you need to say not just where and when are you flying, but also how many bags have you got, how heavy are the bags, how are you paying, can you print your boarding pass, do you need to go to toilet (thanks Ryanair), etc.

Let’s face it: yes, they are all helpful (some more or less helpful than Kayak, Darren), but none of them are authoritative. At WhichBudget, we have plans to launch a meta search engine, but by no means will we ever call it authoritative, the best, the most complete, or even “price comparison”.

Having started a flight directory website back in 2002, we still adhere to the same principle: here’s who flies where and you can check who is the cheapest – depending on your preferences and circumstances!

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Darren: I think there will be more price-comparison sites and more online travel agency sites because the travel market is huge. You don’t have to be as big as Kayak to make money off metasearch. Just a little slice of the pie will make a nice killing for investors. Call it the long tail of price comparison sites.

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Thing is, if there was one that worked best all the time, we’d all use it. The problem isn’t that there are too many trying to get a slice of the pie, it’s that none of the new ones are significantly improving on what’s out there. Hence, it gets boring.

Personally, I tend to use Kayak for long haul and Skyscanner for short haul. Oddly, I’ve actually tested it, and they didn’t come up with the best results but I like the interfaces and find they generally give a good overview.

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Well, of course, one can always use the best flight comparison system around (been around a while, actually) – it’s called a high street travel agent….

..of course, price comparison sites compare “a” price and generally not “the” price, further they do not – none of them – use the criteria of “best value” which is a long way from “the cheapest”.

Actually, “the cheapest” can work out very, very expensive if you are not travel savvy (as opposed to internet savvy) depending of what you are trying to do. If you do not use a travel agent as a matter of course, you very often need a travel agent to interpret the results of any price comparison site.

By way of example, I was checking for Dublin to Brussels (I use price comparison sites for routings – some are very good at this, just to make sure I have not missed something if I am not happy with a fare) – one site managed a record-breaking 18 hours and 30 mins for the journey. “The price” was good, though… so this is an example of best value v. the cheapest.

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@traverants

We don’t need more airfare comparison sites, what we need is for the ones we have to do a better job. Someone (GDS, OTA etc.) needs to offer an easy automated way to compare apples-to-apples total fare (airfare+fees) between carriers. Whoever gets this done will get my air bookings and I believe many others will follow…

@CravenTravels

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Murray’s point brings up another huge pet peeve of mine. How is it even possible that a flight that goes over far more km/stops ends up cheaper than shorter flights. If we ever want a shot at saving the environment, governments need to start enforcing taxes by the km’s flown or number of airports stopped, to at the very least make these kinds of routes a lot less attractive.

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@ Dennis, is Kayak actually making money? Last I heard they were losing quite a bit, but yes, that was a year or two ago. My understanding of the model is it is not much more than re-advertising ads and income per click is pretty bad (and gets worse in the long term the more of these sites there are), with some airlines not even paying anything. You’d probably have to do at least 10-20 million page views per month to sustain 3 or 4 folks. And 10-20 million page views per month don’t come easy OR cheap, and it certainly doesn’t get easier with every new entry in the market! Not to mention the OTA’s and all the 1000′s of other smartly SEO’d travel/airline sites that actually already rank for flight related terms.

I guess you could say I’m bearish on the model, not in the least based on the failure of sites like kelkoo et al. Remember 5 years ago when *those* were all the rage?!

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It really seems like the market is bloated, and I suspect some of the sites are even using the same engine or the same pool of information as eachother. I use a few different ones like kayak, flights24.com, expedia as it is always a classic, and I also suspect they make most of their money through ads and redirections.

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