It's Foolish to Disregard Aggregators in the Search for Low Airfares

Although I have recently dealt with one aspect of the discounted airfares often available from aggregators, the subject is so important that it deserves lengthier treatment.

Though very few members of the public ever use the word "aggregator" to describe the search engines that scan and compare the fares offered by the world's airlines, an increasing percentage of the public are making use of them. This could even be called the "era of the aggregator," as wealthy private equity firms and other wealthy companies compete with one another to offer a billion dollars and more to acquire some of the aggregators.  So it may be helpful to remind you of them.

Kayak.com, which was recently bought for 1.65 billion dollars by Priceline.com, is among the biggest of the aggregators, and you'd be well advised to search it when you're in the market for a cheap airfare. Snapping at its heels, like an aggressive terrier, is the much smaller Hipmunk.com, which has recently created all sorts of innovative ways to display special deals in airfares; it's fun to use. A third U.S.-based aggregator is Mobissimo.com, favored by many.

Overseas (though selling tickets for flights within the U.S. as well as abroad), the Copenhagen-based Momondo.com is an effective firm that frequently presents you with the cheapest fare, as does its Iceland-located competitor, Do-Hop.com, and the Edinburgh-headquartered SkyScanner.net.

And then there are a whole bunch of aggregators that seem to specialize only in the cheapest of fares: CheapOAir.com, CheapFlights.com, Vayama.com, FareChase.com, CheapTickets.com, still others.

The aggregators don't actually sell you the air tickets whose bargain price they've discovered; they simply relay that information to you and depend on the airline itself to actually sell you the ticket. Nevertheless, the airlines incur a small commission expense when an aggregator directs you to the airline's site, and therefore all the airlines are busily engaged in creating all sorts of advantages (priority boarding, increased frequent flyer mileage, advance seat reservations, reduced cancellation fees) designed to bring you directly to the airline's website without first consulting an aggregator.

The airlines are even more determined to avoid selling their tickets through one of the so-called Online Ticket Agencies (OTAs), whose names are Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity; they need to pay a heftier commission to Expedia et al., and therefore they're working hard to persuade the public not to go that route.

What's the lesson to heed from this dizzying array of sources? It is to go first to one of the aggregators, then to one of the OTAs, and finally to check what all of them are offering against the fares offered directly by the airline, by going to the airline's site. Though this may require a half-hour or so of searching at your computer, the savings more than merit the time, especially if you are two or more persons traveling together. And if you are really in need of a cheap fare, above all other considerations, you will also go to the airfare "consolidators," the companies that supposedly take blocs of seats from the airlines, which they are obligated to pay for whether or not they are used. I'm skeptical about that assertion, but it's the claim made by such companies as 1800flyeurope.com, dfwtours.com (airfares from Dallas), www.picassotravel.net (airfares from Los Angeles in particular, but offices in other U.S. cities as well), and www.economytravel.com (tel. 888/222-2110 for the best fares, and especially fares for religious or adoption travelers, from Atlanta).