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My go to site for travel is Expedia. On occasions, I venture out and try others. What I have found out that they all come back with fares that we within a few dollars. My guess is they are all accessing the same database so there is no reason to think one is going to find some bargain rate nobody knows about. This is also true for a lot of so-called "last minute" sites.
To be honest, I search possible itineraries through the ITA Matrix, and then I go directly to the airline website to book. I've never found that Expedia et al get any sort of deal on airfare. Now hotel is a different matter. I have been able to get some lower prices when I book air and hotel together.
I use the Matrix tool because I like seeing how my flight sausage is made. It's definitely not for everyone. Matrix is the backbone of Google Flights and most travel sites, they just tweak how it operates.
For hotels I use Trivago, which is really more of an aggregator of all the travel sites to get you a hotel rate.
USUALLY there is no significant difference in fares. Sometimes there is so I will try more than one if I am not getting an answer I like.
I was a Travelocity user and I stopped because then had a thing where you needed to DESELECT automatically added travel insurance. It was easy to accidentally pay more than you expected. I now use Expedia partly because of habit, partly some modest discounts they occasionally offer.
Conventional wisdom is that you get better prices from the airline websites. Once again, not always, I once got a great deal on Expedia that was not offered by the airline.
I recently booked a flight from Los Angeles to Fiji. On Expedia, the cheapest flight I could book was about $1050. Going to Fiji Airways website, I booked the same flight for $842.
Yeah for airfare...that's why this forum tells people again and again to ditch Expedia and those type of sites for booking airfare. You won't get any bargains (except for maybe like hotel package deals with airfare or something). You probably end up paying more in fact, and you get less control if things go wrong.
Use a good search engine (ITA, etc), then book directly with the airlines.
Yet people still book with Expedia, Travelocity, etc....I can't figure it out. I guess the advertising has them fooled.
Yep, they are all pretty much the same.
For flights, if you use AirFareWatchDog, KAYAK, Expedia, and Google flights, you will find the best prices on flights and the same with Hotels: Expedia, KAYAK, are a few others and they are pretty much all the same. But there are times its just cheaper to go to the airlines website itself after seeing if any discount codes work on them.
Sometimes you might find a coupon code for one sight, but not another. You can find Orbitz codes or Hotel.com codes sometimes that will beat Expedia price. Expedia has been pretty good handling itineraries to me, so I stick with them most of the time unless Hotwire has an unbeatable deal.
I use hotels.com for hotel and sometimes booking. I check Expedia and Fly.com but I don't like either of them
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