Why Bargain Travel Sites May No Longer Be Bargains (backchannel.com)

Aggregators like Expedia have made us lazy -- and we may be missing out on the best deals. From a report on Backchannel: Most of us rely on metasearch engines, like Priceline, Expedia, or Travelocity, which typically use dozens (sometimes as many as 200) of online travel agents, called OTAs, and aggregators to find the best deals. (A metasearch engine and an aggregator are interchangeable terms -- they both scour other sites and compile data under one roof. An OTA is an actual travel agency that actually does the booking and is the lone site responsible for everything you buy through them.) We rely on these sites because we assume they have the secret sauce -- the most powerful search engines, tweaked by superstar programmers armed with the most sophisticated algorithms -- to guide us to the cheapest options. With a single search, you can feel assured that you are paying a rock bottom price. Over time, however, the convention has flipped. As competition among the sites heated up, the hard-to-believe cheap fares required some filtering. A too-good-to-be-true fare ($99 to Europe from California) usually came with a catch (the $400, indirect, ticket home). And as the business models that on which these aggregators rely are getting tighter, the deals are getting worse. How can you be certain you're getting the lowest quote? The short answer is, you can't.

Comments

Re:Lowest price - shittiest room

[peragrin]

Same goes for airfare but use multiple computers. The airlines use cookies and if you visit the same site multiple times they raise the rates on you. So look and then go to a clean computer to book it.

Stay loyal to your preferred airline

[captaindomon]

I've found the best overall savings are if you stay loyal to your preferred airline or hotel chain. Get on their rewards card or miles / points system, and book directly through them. You get the best deals, and a lot more support if anything goes wrong with your reservation. Try getting help from an airline or hotel company if you book through a third party...

Incognito

[SuperKendall]

The airlines use cookies and if you visit the same site multiple times they raise the rates on you. So look and then go to a clean computer to book it.

Whenever I'm looking for travel I browse first and when I decide I want to buy something, I open a Private Browsing window to search one last time for the item, to make sure they are not charging me more in the main screen... of course IP tracking could get around that but I've not seen evidence that happens yet.