How Flight Comparison Sites Work

Price comparison sites have become increasingly popular over the past 10 years for finding cheap flights, hotels, car rental and holidays. They can save you both time and money by searching hundreds or even thousands of prices without you having to manually find, visit and search each individual suppliers site.

However, as with any new system it is important to understand how they work, what the drawbacks are and how you should use them to ensure you find the best price rather than rely on any claims they may make.

Price comparison sites vary in the methods they use to collect prices but will normally either be using screen scraping (taking prices from another websites page) which is then often stored in their database, airfares/route information provided by the airline or agent (which is again stored in the comparison sites database) or live real time checking of fares and availability.

Although live checking of airfares and availability seems like the best option it is in fact the least used since it takes far too much time to retrieve the results from a large number of websites and the flight could depending on demand still be sold out and unavailable by the time you completed the booking process.

To return results quickly the majority of comparison sites search data contained within their own database and then list this information on their results page.

Most comparison sites derive their income from receiving a small commission, often just a few pence, when you click on a suppliers link or make a confirmed booking following a link from their site.

Each comparison site therefore enters into agreements with a large number of suppliers to provide the data for their pricing but no comparison site will have agreements in place with every single airline or agent so prices can vary from comparison site to comparison site.

Further as the prices are not normally retrieved in real time and since airfares can fluctuate rapidly even two comparison sites with the same flight can return results which show differing prices and it is not until you visit the actual agent or airline you discover the current price and availability

Regardless of whether you use a comparison site, booking agent or airline the listed fare does not always represent the total cost. It is often not until you commence the booking process itself that you discover there may be a number of additional charges for things like hold luggage, meals and booking fees.

If you want the cheapest fare you will have to visit several agents sites and start the booking process on each to ascertain the actual price you will pay. Sometimes the higher listed fare can actually work out cheaper.

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