Online travel agents might be spending billions on marketing yet very few make the cut when it comes to sites used to choose a hotel. That can be a downright existential hellscape, a task that can quickly turn from exciting to tedious as you try to juggle various destinations, figure out when’s the best time to travel, how to find the best deals while you’re on the go, what to do when you actually get there, etc, etc, until the idea of traveling inspires a dull but persistent sense of dread.
Jill Fergus Travel Editor Jill is the former travel editor at , showing her expertise on everything from the Best Rooftop Bars in NYC to the 30 Most Beautiful Cities in the World; the NYC native has previously worked at Travel & Leisure and has written articles for The New York Times , InStyle, Huffington Post , and Fodors Recent trips have included the Bahamas and Natchez, and Patagonia and Vietnam are high on the bucket list.
The relationship between travel providers and online booking sites are based on contracts that detail how much information an airline or hotel will share with those sites, and providers pay online travel agencies, or OTAs, a commission on those bookings.
Though in our tests it stumbled a few times on last-minute quotes—how did it miss so many direct London-Barcelona flights on Ryanair, easyJet, and Vueling that all the others found?—it did stellar work on fares six weeks out, either tying or beating the results of our #1 site.
It is admirably transparent about this; when you click the dropdown menu for any deal, it displays its own price first but also includes fares from other sites and the airlines itself that sometimes beat it. Its results screen remains one of the most complete in terms of all the intel it offers in its dashboard—though it would be nice to include actual baggage fees rather than generic notes like baggage fees may apply†on airlines it knows will charge them.