The Top Websites for Buying Cheap Airfare
It is generally considered a better option when looking for cheap airfare to buy airline tickets online. Given that, you have two choices. You can either go directly to the airline website or you can go to a third party website, where it is easy to make comparisons. Most people will tell you that going to the airline is best to get specific information and going to a third party site is best for actually buying a ticket.
The Top 5 Websites for Purchasing Cheap Airfare
There are a number of websites you can go for purchasing airline tickets today. There are 5 websites that are considered the top for purchasing cheap airfare. We will look at these five websites here and give you a basic comparison.
The top five websites today for purchasing cheap airfare are: Expedia, Orbitz, Hotwire, Travelocity, Priceline and Kayak.
After running similar tests on all five websites we found results that provided interesting comparisons. In this experiment, the same travel criteria, time, date and destinations were used.
With the exception of only one site, all the prices were pretty close to the same. So between the four we really can not say which is best for pricing, because they all were so close. Hotwire did not seem to offer the same choices as all the other sites. As well, the prices on Hotwire were more because of not offering the same choices.
The most annoying thing we ran into over and over again is that these websites continually try to up sell the viewer. You have to scroll past a multitude of other travel related offers they wanted you to receive help with, look at, or buy. Of the 5, Expedia and Travelocity, though very well known, were the worst at presenting annoying up sell offers.
Kayak, one of the newer sites on the internet, actually had one of the quickest and smoothest paths to getting the desired tickets. The unique thing about Kayak is that when you are ready to purchase they take you directly to the airline website.
It is important to note that two airlines in particular, at least at the date of this writing require you to go directly to their site for tickets, availability and pricing. Because they too have very competitive pricing it is a wise choice to include them in your hunt.
These two sites are Jet Blue and Southwest Airlines.
Good luck with your hunt to find cheap airfare. There are many more tips and techniques to get great prices. They are all revealed in the book Save on Airfare Secrets, which has been reviewed on this site.
If you are looking for a place to buy cheap airfare there are many choices where to buy tickets online. Here are the top 5 websites that are most used for buying airline tickets today.