A comparison of online travel sites
IN THE beginning, you called an airline or travel agent when you wanted to book a trip. But if you’ve done any travelling at all within the last 15 years, you’ve probably come across a fare aggregator or metasearch site. Hundreds of perfectly legitimate ones exist; you’ve undoubtedly heard of Expedia, Priceline and Hotwire, to name three. Does it matter which site you use, or are they all basically the same?
These online travel agencies, or OTAs, and search sites scrape data from other sources, reorganise it and present it to you, the user. The two proverbial 800-pound gorillas in the travel world are Expedia Inc and the Priceline Group. Together, they have a hand in most of the major travel booking sites. I ran through various scenarios – purchasing a flight, a hotel room and a flight, hotel and car package – with the aid of a sampling of those sites: Travelocity (owned by Expedia), Kayak (owned by Priceline) and the newish kid on the block, Hipmunk. I also searched directly with airline and hotel sites. I admit that I went into this informal study expecting prices and options to be more or less the same from site to site. Let’s just say I was surprised by how mistaken I was.
Flights
I researched a long-weekend trip from New York City to Chicago from May 26 to 29 using those three sites, as well as individual airline sites. Travelocity offered a fare of $338 for a flight leaving Kennedy Airport around 7am on Delta and getting back into La Guardia on Spirit Airlines at 9am on Monday.
Kayak’s lowest advertised flight was on Delta for $362, a notable difference. (Kayak also offers “hacker fares” – flying different legs of a roundtrip flight on different airlines – but I couldn’t even find the flight that Travelocity offered me on Kayak.) Hipmunk’s lowest advertised flight was an allSpirit flight from La Guardia to O’Hare and back for $372.
Things got interesting when I searched on the airlines’ websites. The Delta flight Kayak offered me was the same price on the Delta site. With Spirit, though, things were a little wonky. The Travelocity flight that had one Delta leg and one Spirit leg cost just $269 if I booked the individual legs on the Delta and Spirit websites, respectively: saving $69. There was also a big difference with the Spirit flight Hipmunk offered: If booked directly on the Spirit site, the same flight cost $65 less.
Hotels
Flights are travel sites’ bread and butter, right? Wrong. Hotels are where the money is. A 2013 Forbes article noted that an astounding 97 percent of Priceline’s revenue came from hotel bookings. Booking.com, which is owned by Priceline, is a big revenue driver and is able to do an enormous volume, as the company doesn’t act as the merchant of record. It simply connects guests with hotels and takes a fee.
Let’s get back to our long weekend in Chicago: Hotel selection is a bit more subjective, as more criteria are involved. I searched for a room for two at a four-star property downtown. Travelocity’s first nonsponsored recommendation was a room with a king bed at the Hard Rock Hotel Chicago, a decent choice, for $149 per night. Kayak’s first suggestion was the Hyatt Regency Chicago (also a king room) for $179 per night. Hipmunk’s top result? The Palmer House (with only a double bed) for $184 per night.
All three sites had the Hyatt room for $179. Travelocity had the same deal on the Palmer House, but Kayak shaved off a few bucks, offering the room at $180 per night. As for the Hard Rock Hotel, only Traveloc- ity had the $149 rate; the other sites offered the room at $159.
On their own respective sites, the Hyatt and Palmer House rates were the same as the aggregators’. At the Hard Rock Hotel’s site, though, the lowest rate was $169.
Packages
Let’s book the flight and hotel together and save some big money, shall we? I searched the same Chicago weekend on Travelocity, looking for the same flights and hotels as a package for two people. With taxes and fees, the total came to $1,207, saving . . . negative three dollars. That’s right, it was actually more expensive to buy this particular itinerary as a package instead of booking the flights and hotels separately.
Hipmunk also offered a package with its preferred hotel, the Palmer House, for $1,310 for two people, saving $82. It’s worth noting that the package included a JetBlue flight, not the lowest-priced Spirit flight that it advertised (which some may consider a plus).
As for Kayak, buying a package that featured the Hyatt Regency Chicago, wasn’t even available as an option. It did advertise a package at the Palmer House for $1,574, however, a significant markup from Hipmunk’s offering. And while my searches are admittedly a tiny sample relative to Kayak’s vast offerings, I noticed another hiccup on the very next package I selected: the Hyatt Regency O’Hare, advertised at $1,092 total for two people. I clicked on the price and was redirected to JetBlue Vacations, which had the price at $1,306.
If you’re looking to save money, don’t take things at face value; results can vary greatly from site to site. Do your research and inquire directly with travel providers in addition to searching the big travel aggregators. They want your business, certainly, but promises of big savings don’t hold up in all cases.