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Airfare Booking Strategies

There is no single website that we think is best for making airline reservations—each one has some strengths and weaknesses. However, Google Flights and Momondo make a great 1-2 punch.

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Google Flights
Momondo
Skyscanner
Hipmunk
Southwest Airlines
ITA Matrix
Kayak

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Google Flights is the fastest and most “powerful” of all the airfare sites. That makes it a particularly good option, when you want to check a bunch of different possible dates or destination airports. There are a lot of nice details in the way that it presents information throughout the user interface, making it a joy to use. We wind up using it far more often than any other site for finding flight options.

Momondo

Momondo searches a larger number of low-cost airlines around the world. If you are travelling internationally, particularly when you are looking for intra-region flights, such as flights from one part of Europe to another, it is going to find options that Google Flights does not.

When your dates are flexible, Momondo shows a convenient calendar to help you find cheaper options. However, the prices are just estimates, and you need to search each day individually to see what the best options are.

If we had to use a single site for looking for airfare, it would be Momondo. But, we tend to use Google Flights for its speed, when we don’t care as much about exhaustively uncovering flights from every airline; and Momondo when we do.

Skyscanner

Skyscanner is the other really good site that includes most of the low-cost airlines around the world. We often use it alongside Momondo, when we are willing to put in a little bit of extra time, because each one sometimes finds additional options that the other does not.

Hipmunk

Hipmunk does the best job of presenting the available fight options. The results from many other websites are often full of extra flights, that are strictly worse than the other flight options—variations with somewhat longer layovers and higher prices. Hipmunk does a great job of hiding these. By default, it lists flights in an order based on both price and convenience—so that the most interesting options are listed first.

We think it is has the nicest user interface of any site, and that makes it our favorite site to use for domestic flights. when we don’t have a lot of flexibility with the travel dates. They just don’t have the airline coverage to be a good option for international flights, and they don’t have the speed to be a good option for exploring lots of different alternatives.

Southwest Airlines

Southwest Airlines won’t let other websites show its fares. So, you’ll need to go directly to their website, to see if what they offer. However, Momondo does usually show Southwest fares directly on its site.

ITA Matrix

ITA Matrix allows you to use special codes to provide much more control over the flights it searches. For example, you can search only for flights that connect in a certain airport, are flown on a particularly type of plane, offer a certain fare code, or have a connection of a specified length. Most readers won’t have a need to use it. However, it provides powerful flexibility that can be useful in some circumstances. Using ITA Matrix--The Most Sophisticated Airfare Search Tool.