Dohop is a relatively new search engine from Icelandic company Dohop Ltd. At launch, it concentrated on low cost airlines but now includes "standard" airlines and fares, and suggests flight combinations where needed. It does not sell flights or take bookings but the search results include links to airlines and travel agent websites where you can book tickets directly. To search, you start typing in the location of your departure point and dohop will come up with a list of suggested airports as it does with your destination. Click on the date fields and a calendar pops up to help you enter them in a valid format.
When the results list is displayed, you can narrow down your search by airport, transits and airline. Prices are automatically displayed when there is only one price for an airline/airport. For the other results, click on the Get Price link and the range of options is displayed together with the source. For my London/Inverness test search it came up with four prices for a flight that it had found on the BMI web site, Expedia, ebookers and Opodo. Prices are in shown by default in Euros but you can change the currency via a pull down menu. So far, I am impressed and I have not yet been able to better the results by going to my usual sources one by one.
I think there are some great tools on their way in this field.
ReplyDeleteHave a look at www.skyscanner.net and www.momondo.com for similar low cost searches.
Momondo does not have a lot of fancy functions - but seems to seach the lowest fares between european cities
Check also the site www.onindo.com – a provider of travel search technology with API options for web-sites.
ReplyDeleteThe ultimate website for return flights that include budget and traditional airlines is www.FerrisFlights.com
ReplyDeleteIt searches the major agencies / airlines but importantly it allows you to search with flexible dates.
Just had a look at FerrisFlights and it only seems to work in Internet Explorer. Firefox and Opera do not display the results.
ReplyDeleteThere was a recent update which caused a problem in Firefox and Opera. This has now been fixed. I guess in saying this I am also declaring my association with the website. :)
ReplyDeleteOk well I'm trying to book a rtn flight for early August (flex dates) from London to Vancouver. I know most of these search engines are European budget airline focussed, but doesn't hurt to try them out on a transatlantic route.
ReplyDeleteOverall, the best site was Skyscanner. It gave me the best price of £580. Momodo was second with £682. The reason these two came top for me was the flexible date search and graphical bar chart which made it very clear when the cheapest flights were. Judging from the price discrepency, Skyscanner search more flights than Momodo for this route.
Dohop and Onindo were a little disappointing. I couldn't find the flexible date search and didn't have time to enter all my possibilities! Maybe I missed it though.
Ferrisflight.com was still a little buggy and crashed when I did my flexible search. Can't say either way on that one.
Overall though, I found the best price of £490 (flyglobespan.com) by doing my own searching. I only had to look through 4 or 5 airlines to find this, so although it took a little longer it wasn't that bad and it saved me £90.
Bottom line - if you want to use one of these I'd recommend skyscanner. However, that's only going on my experince of this one route. Furthermore, the fact I was able to find a better price suggests the search engines need to become more comprehensive (despite claims they search through hundreds of providers). My recommendation is to supplement the results these sites provide with some searching of your own, time allowing.
You might want to give http://www.cheap-flights-finder.com a go
ReplyDeleteThe site compares multiple flight aggregators with 1 search including Dohop, Skyscanner, Mobissimo, Kayak and Kelkoo.
It is essential to compare multiple flight comparison sites as each one tends to produce different results.
http://www.cheap-flights-finder.com is the fastest way, I have found, to compare results from multiple flight comparison sites.