Reid Bramblett, author of our recent studies on how to find the best booking engines for airfares, and the best ones for lodgings, unpacked his research. He discussed which sites find the lowest rates most consistently, how to filter results smartly, VPN uses for travel bookings, and when doing multiple searches will be the only way to find the lowest prices.

Takeaways:

• The travel industry presents complex pricing structures that require careful examination to avoid overpaying.
• Reid Bramlett conducted an extensive study to identify the best booking engines for airfares and hotels.
• AI chatbots currently perform poorly in providing accurate travel pricing information.
• Momondo emerged as the top airfare search engine due to its superior price-finding capabilities and filters.
• Google Hotels consistently finds the lowest hotel prices, with Trivago coming in a very close second.
• Some engines surface the fees and taxes that can drastically increase the overall costs but others do not so engaging a VPN can help you more easily see what the end cost will be (and might find you lower prices overall).

You are listening to the Fromer Travel show and at Fromers, we pride ourselves in helping you not overpay for travel.

That's a real problem in the travel industry, especially right now, as travel providers get cleverer and cleverer and in terms of how they present prices.

This is especially true for airfare and hotels.

If you've been searching, you know, there isn't actually any one airfare for a journey or any one hotel rate.

It all depends on where you look, when you look, and how you look.

So to help us figure this out, both on this podcast and on fromers.com, we have Reid Bramlett, who is a travel writer par extraordinaire, been in the business forever, knows every trick in the book, and every other year or so he does a study for us looking at the top booking engines for both airfares and hotels.

We're going to unpack that study.

Hey, Breed, welcome back to the Froma Travel Show.

Hi, Pauline.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Well, it's probably a bigger pleasure than doing the massive study you did, which I know is a huge amount of work.

Tell us what went into figuring out which are the best booking engines.

How did you weight the results?

Well, there was a lot of spreadsheet fun involved with this.

I went through and I tried to throw as many scenarios as I could think of at as many websites as I could think of.

So between 14 and 16 top websites out there.

And I would ask it for multiple, say, airfares, domestic, international, and some airfares that are even involved in the United States, like going from London to Barcelona to figure out, you know, can they find the lowest price on the low cost carriers in Europe.

And I just looked at all the results.

I looked at who could find the cheapest price on the airfare, like including plane changes, and who could find the cheapest direct price.

And as you said earlier, it's amazing that it's not always the same answer from every website out there.

So it really does pay to look at more than one.

Yeah, and this year there was another wrinkle because a lot of folks are looking at chatbots at AI to try and figure out their travel plans.

And so not only did you look at Expedia, Momondo, Booking.com, all of the major sites we know you also looked at ChatGPT and its cohort.

So let's get AI out of the way first.

You tested AI as well as these websites.

How did it do?

I did.

I was a little nervous, you know, Figuring is this, in the end of doing these kind of surveys, can they do a better job than, you know, my human fingers and human brain?

And the good news is, at least for now, at least for us, they were terrible at it.

I tried six major chatbots.

Claude and Grok.

Both found the right airfare, right airline, but radically different airfares.

Perplexity and Deep Sync.

Both liked Spirit on this particular airfare from New York to la, but they disagreed on the price.

Emily was twice as high as the other and neither one was the actual correct price.

Wow.

And often what you found with AI in terms of airfares was they would find higher airfares than the regular booking engines that we all know about.

Right, right.

And the interesting thing was, no, it never went on price.

Well, sometimes it would say a ridiculously low price that wasn't even available.

So it wasn't even getting the correct answer.

Gemini got the correct answer once, but Gemini is Google's flight, is Google's AI engine.

And so he just got the answer from the Google search, which was pretty effective.

But then that was on one airfare.

And Google was not always the number one website when it came to finding all the airfares.

So they didn't get it right.

They often over promised or they undersold, and they were really difficult to pin down on details.

If you wanted to go into any more depth, they just gave up.

They'd throw up their virtual hands and say, I'm sorry, I can't do that.

Right.

I remember you tried to get AI to find you a hotel on the Strip of Las Vegas which didn't include a casino.

And that's something that this travel writer knows offhand, which, which hotels they are.

What happened when you asked ChatGPT to solve that riddle for you?

Well, what I did is in those cases, I didn't actually go to the independent AIs I used.

Most of the websites out there now have their own built in AI filter.

Like they have the usual filters for prices and airlines and destinations and things like that.

And a lot of them now have a smart filter which is grossly unnamed because it was not clever in the slightest.

It worked once or twice.

But then I try something else on it and would get it completely wrong.

They would say things like, oh, sure, I can find you hotels off the Strip, and it would give me four hotels in Henderson, Nevada, which technically is off the Strip.

It's also in a different city and it would give me, find me hotels without a casino, and it would find me some hotels without casinos, but then a bunch that actually had the word casino in their name.

So it was pretty much not there yet.

I'm sure it'll get better, but for the moment it was sort of a useless, almost comically so feature.

Okay, so we now know AI, at least for now, is not winning anyway.

So let's do airfares first.

Okay, if you want to find the lowest airfare.

And let me also say that you talked about airfares in your article in a smart way.

You did not include the airfares that take you eight hours out of your way to save $50.

So tell us about the waiting you did for that and spelled W E I G H T, not wait.

Oh, there was a lot of waiting on some of these websites.

They were slower than you'd expect.

And I do mention that in the article.

Which ones sort of sit you with that spinning wheel for five minutes, you have to restart it.

But I weighted them in terms of finding out what kind of airfare it is a science.

I took a lot of data, but there's a bit of art to it.

And for any itinerary that spent at least 50% of its time sitting in O' Hare Airport, I said, no, we're not going to do that.

Or if it wanted you to fly from Philadelphia to Tampa via Cleveland, that made no sense.

So anything that significantly extended the amount of time you traveled for a modicum of savings was just not on.

Okay, so that wasn't included.

I also avoided.

There's a site called Skip Lagged, which is named after the technique for which it became famous, which is the Hidden City Fairs, which is basically you take a flight from where you are to where you're going that continues on to a third destination.

And for various complicated reasons, the way airlines do their pricing, sometimes the flight from here to LA is more expensive than the flight.

I mean, it's cheaper than the flight from here to Denver, even though it's shorter.

But the plane stops in Denver.

So if you get that LA flight, which is cheaper, and you get off the plane in Denver, hey, you've saved money.

The problem is, obviously you can't check any luggage because your luggage is going to keep going.

And if the airline finds out you've done it, they will cancel your return ticket.

Sometimes they'll even try to sue you.

It goes against their terms and practices.

So it is technically a technique you can use.

But I don't think we consider it really a viable one because of all it very fraught.

So we left fares like that on the side we just looked at what is the actual airfare a real human flying, a real itinerary is going to find.

Right.

Okay.

So with that all in mind, here's a drum roll.

Which is the best airfare search engine?

Well, the best airfare search engine, if you just look at price alone, believe it or not, is Momondo.

It's not an unusual name.

To our listeners and our readers@fromrs.com, momondo.com continues to just dominate the airplane.

But it didn't win the last time, I thought.

Wasn't it?

No, it didn't let me, because I have this all written down on my sheet, my spreadsheets, to figure out how well they've done.

Was it Kayak that won?

Well, Kayak and Momondo are now the same thing.

Right.

And that is one of the big stories out of this, is that the corporate consolidation is sort of eating away at this point at the illusion of choice.

We've known for a long time there's been this consolidation.

Expedia Group owns Car Rentals.com, cheap Tickets, ebookers, Expedia itself, Hotels.com, hotwire, Orbitz, Travelocity, trivago, vrbo, and that's just one of them.

There are several other conglomerates out there, and for a long time, they.

They sort of let their individual websites kind of run on their own with their own databases and their own interfaces and algorithms.

I mean, Orbits and Travelocity very quickly became the same as Expedia, but recently, more and more of them have started to sort of merge their results.

So in Hotels, for example, Momondo used to have its own results, but now it's really just a front for the hotels combined.com data, which is an aggregator, and so is Kayak.

So Momondo has better filters than Kayak, and it's designed a little easier on the eyes.

So we say Momondo 1.

But if you go to Kayak, you get the exact same results.

And it was the same last year, but prior to that, it ranked number six.

So it's really come up in the world.

Okay, so it's Momondo Kayak that found the lowest prices most consistently.

Correct?

That would be the best way to put it, yes.

Okay, and what else did they do right, do you think?

Well, in addition to finding the best prices the most number of times, Momondo has the best filters in the business.

Now, the filters are the things that allow you to say, I only want to leave from these airports in a particular Destination or I want to sort it by price or by fastest or whatever.

And Momondo not only has all of those, it has things like booking sites.

So you can say I don't want to book on these places.

I've never heard of these third party websites that might be a little fly by night, pardon the pun, or the kind of aircraft, the flight quality.

And the number one thing that Momondo offers that nobody else in industry does, it allows you to tick off a checkbox for how many carry ons you have and how many checked bags you want to take.

And it will recalculate all of the prices for each airline with the baggage fees included.

Nobody else does that.

That's great.

That's really helpful actually.

Yeah, it's incredibly helpful because sure it's like $30 or $40, you figure that' of flying.

But there are some airlines where the difference can be $10 on one airline and $90 on another.

So it really pays to know what the baggage fees are going to be.

Interesting.

And that.

Well, we'll come back to that opaqueness when we talk about hotels.

So Momondo was number one.

What was number two?

Number two this time around was skyscanner.

Huh.

It's been number two for a while.

Number one is swaps out, but number two, and the skyscanner just holds on to that number two spot.

It was really good at finding advanced purchase fares.

In other words, airfares leaving six weeks out or longer.

Last minute fares.

Not quite as good as some of the others, but it was pretty much almost as good as Momondo.

On what we call Apex fares in the industry, it found more than three quarters of the time it found a fare that was better than the average or sometimes the best.

I remember in past years there was one website that was better on like airfares to Asia or Last minute fares.

Did you find niches like that in the list?

I did.

And like I said, they do vary on who has the best on Last minute and who has the best on airfares at certain destinations.

The destinations one seems to have fallen a little bit by the wayside in hotels as well.

It used to be that there was a website that was really good at Asian hotels called Agodo, right?

Yes, Agodo.

That started as a website for booking hotels in Asia, but it seems to have lost that edge again as it's become its results have gotten consolidated with those of its corporate cousins.

Huh.

Interesting.

Okay.

And one of the big news items from this article was that all of the websites now Cover Southwest.

It's no longer hiding behind the veil, right?

Yes.

That is one of the two big news items to come out that covers everything in the airfare industry, is that Southwest, which you used to have to look up on your own, is now canvassed by nearly all of the aggregators and the online travel agencies, the places we actually book it.

There are two that made our top 10 that do not, as of this date, include Southwest yet, and that is Skiplagged and Flight Network.

Huh.

Interesting.

It's almost all the way there.

The other big news is that TripAdvisor, which was usually in the top five in our last several times doing this, will no longer be booking airfares or hotels.

It's getting rid of its booking services, and it's going back to just crowdsourced travel information.

Interesting.

Wow.

Okay.

Now, on hotels, Google actually found the best prices most consistently.

Google.

Is it called Google Hotels or what's the name there?

Well, if you go to Google and you search on hotels, it'll start giving you the results that you're looking for.

But if you want an interface that kind of looks like a hotel booking, one with lots of options, you go to google.com travel and there you can pick flights, hotels, vacation packages, and that will give you a more usable Interface.

So it's google.com travel hotels, if you want to get technical.

And it found the lowest prices most consistently.

How much lower?

Well, it's really a matter of how many times does it find the.

The absolute cheapest price versus an average price or one that's not as good.

And when we ranked these websites, that's the ranking that we used.

If it found the absolute best price, it got points.

Found a good price, it got points, but fewer.

And it got negative points for finding a bad price or the absolute worst price, or in some cases, not even managing to find that hotel in that city at all, which some of them suffered from.

Well, for those of us who try to avoid Google because they're taking over the world, what was number two?

Number two?

Yeah.

Number two was a big surprise to me because it has not been number two or even number one.

It has usually been down at number eight and number seven in the last six times we've done this.

And that is Trivago, huh?

Yep, Trivago.

I think maybe they stopped spending so much money on those incessant ad campaigns with that silver fox and a white void telling you about Trivago, and now they've actually invested it in their algorithms.

I don't know if that's the truth.

But it does definitely seem to be the case because it really rocked.

It did a great job of finding inexpensive hotels and finding a large number of inexpensive hotels in every city we threw at it.

Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Rome, Philadelphia.

It just.

It rocked.

It was amazing.

Not quite as good as Google, but for a traditional aggregator, it really kind of blew the pants off everybody.

Including one website that used to rank really high and now is languishing back in Trivago's old area, number eight, booking.com.

Huh.

So, again, my theory is that the booking.

Yeah, Commercials are eating up their ability to actually focus on giving you good results.

Interesting.

And does Trivago do rentals as well as hotels?

It does.

That is one thing that a lot of them are including.

More and more is including not just hotels, but also vacation homes, which means an apartment, an Airbnb type property.

Often they're through something like vrbo.

And you can search on that.

You can say, I want just hotels, or I want hotels and apartments, or I also want budget stays, which would be like B&Bs and hostels, guest houses, that kind of thing.

Hmm.

Okay, now, what about all the fees?

The extra fees that come out come with hotels.

Is it easy to see those now on these, on these booking engines?

That is another big change in the last two years.

It used to be that it was almost impossible to find out all of the taxes and fees you were going to pay.

They would have the generic tax, which in most countries is the VAT tax, and it's federal.

But it often would not include city taxes, which could be 15% or even worse, cleaning fees on rental properties or resort fees at hotels.

And that could tack on 30, 40, 60, $150.

I've seen ones where the base rate was $79, but once you added taxes and fees, it was $280, which was ridiculous.

It used to be the only way you could get around that was to pretend you were Irish, by which I mean use a vpn, a virtual private network, to spoof the computer into thinking you're coming from another country, in this case Ireland, because you needed to be from the European Union, the eu, because they have regulations requiring the fees to be disclosed up front.

And Ireland has the benefit of the results also coming in English.

Now, that is still the case for about half the sites out there, including Trivago, that we talked about.

But interestingly, there are some websites that now include taxes and fees in the first results they show you.

Huh.

It often is in fine print.

A Little bit smaller than the big lead price that they show in bold because they want you to notice the cheapest price.

And when you do sort by, you know, sort by price and things like that, it will still sort by that base price and not the total price.

But at least they show it to you before you click through eight different screens to get to the page where you put in your credit card information and discover the hotel is three times as much as you thought it was.

Right.

Does Google and Trivago, do they show you the final price in smaller type or.

No, Google is the only one of the top four sites that shows you the final fee, including taxes and fees.

Although it's when you go to the individual results of each hotel.

Okay.

The next three do not.

It's actually some at more at the bottom of the list in terms of finding the best price that, ironically enough, include all the fees as well.

Okay.

Apologies for my dog, he hates fees.

Hence all the barking.

So back to fees.

You talked about how Momondo allows you to check and kind of change the search by luggage fees.

To my mind, one of the ugliest fees out there is parking fees.

Do any of these hotel websites let you shift the site by adding that into the search or no?

No.

Most of them will have tick marks for amenities, and one of those will be parking if it's available, including, I noticed recently, EV charging stations.

But they do not, unfortunately, have the actual price, I think, because it's not divulged necessarily in the database of information they get from each one.

Whereas baggage fees for airlines are in there.

It's just many websites choose not to show them.

Okay.

And just to clarify the point you made earlier about virtual private networks, VPNs, if you search from Ireland, which I love that idea, will you more likely see the total price in the first results page or no?

Absolutely.

You have to, by law, EU regulations require it to show you the actual total price.

Wow.

The very first time they show you the results, it might be in Euros because you've changed to Ireland, but you can usually on every site except for google.com, you can tick a little box to change that to dollars if it helps you not do conversions in your head.

Well, that's really useful to know.

I'm trying to think of another.

Well, it has to be an EU site.

Yeah, very, very interesting.

And we don't know you didn't check to see whether the price was different using a vpn, because we know that a lot of companies are profiling people by the area they live in and surfacing different prices.

Oh, it's not just the area you live in, it's the cookies they put on.

It's all your personal data.

There was an article about it in the Times today.

We're recording this.

Yeah, that they are really creating personal files on every single person.

As they say, if something is given to you for free, you are the product.

They are collecting data on you and selling it bundled to other parties.

Usually not for nefarious purposes, but you could consider someone upping the price because they think you have more disposable income kind of nefarious.

I consider that definitely nefarious.

Well, it's another reason to use a VPN when you do these searches as well.

And also clean out all your cookies from your browser cache.

It means you won't be able to automatically log into sites, but it will keep a site from pulling that scam where they.

Not a scam, but from pulling that move where they show your price.

And then when you go back to, it shows your price slightly higher and it creates that false sense of urgency.

So you'll book it right now.

And a lot of them unfortunately do do that.

So if you use a virtual network and you make sure you clear your cache and your cookies and use a browser that's really good at doing that, then you usually can get much more consistent results.

Okay, well, that's important.

Is there anything we haven't covered that you thought we should have coming into this article, coming into this conversation?

Well, I think it's interesting that there are some deals on the hotel side that you can only get if you go directly to the online travel agency that is selling it.

Because the aggregators will canvass all of the online travel agencies, all the ones that actually sell you the information, I mean, sell you the tickets as well as the best ones.

We'll also look at the hotel's own website because that'll often beat one of these online travel agencies.

But some of the online travel agencies have deals that you can only get by going directly to them sometimes, Right.

On the surface, if you just go to the site, sometimes you have to log in for their genius rate or their member only discounts, which is usually worth doing.

We did not, for this particular articles do that because we wanted to get the plain vanilla rates that everyone can find.

Right.

However, conversely, there are some rates that the large aggregators have locked in at the online travel agencies that you won't get unless you go through the aggregator like Trivago or Skyscanner.

Yeah, it's the weirdest thing.

Sometimes it was lower going direct, sometimes it was lower going through an aggregator, which just means you kind of got to look at both.

Oh.

Oh, I hate that.

So it's a lot.

It's very frustrating.

It's very frustrating.

So that's a lot of work.

So you need to sign in, look at it that way.

But then you can't use a VPN if you're signing in to get the secret rate.

And then.

And you also have to look at the.

So that's.

You have to do that with the OTAs, the online travel agency.

You have to do that with the aggregators, and maybe you have to do it with the hotels.

Or will you consistently find the hotel direct places on the sites that aggregate different.

Different prices?

Most of the.

Most of the best aggregators and the ones that we recommend at the top of the list will canvas the individual sites of the hotels themselves.

And if you go to a hotel site, it will tell you what the rate is and what their member rate is to join their, you know, membership club and what the AAA rate is.

Things like that.

Yeah.

What percentage of the time is the hotel rate lowest?

I would think it's a lot.

Right.

Or, no, the hotel rate is.

I would.

I didn't actually calculate percentages, but just if I had to rough it out from all the results that I've seen, I looked at about 800 results for hotels for this article.

Wow.

It was probably about, yeah, 75, 80% of the time.

But sometimes, you know, a hotel, in order to move rooms, will offer a discount to a third party to sell those rooms because they know that more people know the names of trivago or booking.com or priceline or something like that.

And so they figure, well, if we have to eat a little bit of profit to get way more bookings, then we'll offer a discount to the people coming through those venues.

So, again, you kind of have to look at all of the options, which is why we have a top 10 list, so that you'll know which are the best ones to go to first.

Well, and on that happy note, I will say thank you so, so much, Reid.

I learned a lot.

No trouble.

Pauline, I appreciate it, and I appreciate doing this article every two years, even if it involves a whole lot of spreadsheets.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, you are the spreadsheet king.

Thanks again.

And that is it for this week's show.

I thank you so, so much for listening.

And to those who are traveling, may I wish you a hearty Bon voyage.

Sour candy on the table.

Lazy afternoons in your sweatpants Watching cable well, it feels so far away.

All.

The channels seem the same.

Trying to remember all the songs we like to play?

Cause those lazy afternoons don't come so fresh frequently these days oh, it's been so long and I cannot help but wonder Are you ever coming home?

I like you with your sour candy in the bouse on the lake oh, but I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate the way it tastes.