The Great Airfare Aggregator Shoot Out – Where to Find Airfare Deals

• 
  
  
• Tweet
• Sharebar

• Tweet

So you want to book a trip online. There are many sites to go to, how do you know which one is the best? That was the question that I had when I got an email from Cfares.com PR agency telling me how much better Cfares.com was than the traditional travel sites: Orbitz.com, Expedia.com and Travelocity.com. Cfares is one of a collection of new sites that searches across a number of travel sites at once to try and get the best deal. I decided to see which of the aggregator sites worked the best against a set of routes that I chose somewhat at random. I checked all of the sites at the same time in case fares might be changing.

The Big Three

First we can look at the results for these 7 destinations from Orbitz, Expedia and Travelocity. All three sites did about the same although Expedia did the best of the three.

Airfare Aggregators

Then we can look at the 5 aggregator sites Kayak, Cfares, Farechase, Mobissimo and Momondo. Since the aggregator sites often search Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia you will see that at least one of the aggregator sites beat the fares of the big three. Not also that even the aggregators don’t search some low cost carriers like Southwest.

1. Some of the searches on these sites produced no results and are marked with “not found”. No doubt if I had kept trying I would have gotten a result but Cfares and Momondo seem to have some scaling problems in this test.
2. Cfares has a premium offering which costs $50 a year and one of the fares given has two results, for premium users and normal users.

Conclusion

Kayak has usually been the aggregator site that I turn to for my travel booking, but Mobissimo stands out for me in this very unscientific test as a search engine I should try more often.

One thing to keep in mind is that this search was for airfare alone. If you are traveling to a major city you can sometimes get a better deal by booking your hotel and flight together. That may be a better use for Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia.