The Pros and Cons of Booking With Fare Aggregators – JTB …
The Pros and Cons of Booking With Fare Aggregators
By | For Travelers | 2 comments | 31 October, 2019 | 0
This article was updated October, 2019.
The quest for cheap airline tickets can sometimes feel never-ending. And it often leads to this question: Do fare aggregators really find the cheapest flights? The answer is: sometimes. As with any flight-booking tool, fare aggregators come with their own unique pros and cons. Here’s a look at what a fare aggregator is, as well as the benefits and drawbacks each offers.
Fare Aggregators vs. Flight Booking Engines
When you think of a fare aggregator, you may be picturing Expedia, Travelocity or a similar site. But these are actually flight booking engines. There’s a fine line between fare aggregators and booking engines, but it’s an important distinction to make.
Booking engines like Orbitz, Expedia or Travelocity are basically search engines that find travel deals from airlines that agree to let their fares show in the results. In exchange for doing this heavy lifting, they charge a fee when you choose to book.
Fare aggregators are slightly different. They actually search the search engines, scouring the Internet more broadly to help pinpoint the very best deal possible. and are examples of fare aggregators — sites that are likely to share what you’ll find using booking engines, plus a multitude of other options that sometimes help reduce the cost of your trip. Fare aggregators charge a fee, too, but the additional savings you discover often cover this fee.
What Makes a Good Fare Aggregator?
What makes a good fare aggregator? First things first: helping you find the absolute cheapest airline tickets. But what helps a fare aggregator find this lowest-possible price? You’ll want to use a fare aggregator that is searching as many search engines as possible — casting the widest net, if you will.
There’s also user experience. You’ll want to use a fare aggregator that works quickly and that displays your options in an easy-to-understand manner. For example, you’ll want to be able to sort on different metrics, including number of stops, price, schedule, etc.
Some fare aggregators display cheap flight tickets that aren’t typically available to the public, and others allow you to search with vague dates — a function that helps you find the lowest fare from among multiple departure/arrival options. Each of these features makes for a more effective aggregator.
The Pros of Fare Aggregators
A good fare aggregator is a useful tool because it canvasses the greatest amount of options in search of the cheap air fare. You’re not always getting such a vast search when you choose booking engines or other flight search options.
Another benefit to using fare aggregators is that some focus on a specific type of travel. For example, looks at only international fares. This type of specialization is rare among other flight search options, but it can often yield a really affordable rate that you wouldn’t be able to secure otherwise.
The Cons of Fare Aggregators
Fare aggregators are only as effective as the search engines they are searching, so there’s no guarantee that you’re truly securing the lowest-possible rate. Also, some fare aggregators will prey on your desire for a low price by offering initial pricing at first, then upping the fare once you click through.
Fare aggregators are also imperfect in many ways. Some will bill a fare as non-stop even when the flight includes a stopover without changing planes. Of course, in this scenario, you’re technically getting a non-stop flight, but you still get all of the waiting and inconvenience of a multi-leg trip.
Ranking the 10 Best Airfare Search Sites
Frommer’s recently tested a number of different search sites, including both aggregators and booking engines. For each search site, they tested a blend of last-minute and well-in-advance flights traveling in and out of both major hubs and regional airports around the world. Here’s how different sites performed, starting with the best and working down to the worst:
Momondo (aggregator): Momondo easily beat the competition in this test, returning the lowest price 16 times out of a total of 25 searches. It also features a helpful, user-friendly yscanner (aggregator): Skyscanner is known as one of the first aggregators to include discount airlines, and it returned the lowest price several times during this Flights (aggregator): Google Flights couples incredibly fast performance with search results that include fares other sites have a hard time (aggregator): Kayak is one of the best-known aggregators, and it did well in this test at finding ways to shave a few dollars off what other sites returned as the lowest-cost flight. Hipmunk (aggregator): Hipmunk never returned the lowest fares compared to the other sites, but it did serve consistently low prices — and it scores highly for (booking engine): did well finding deals on last-minute international flights with plane changes, but it did not perform as well at finding good direct atguru (booking engine): While Seatguru does provide a wealth of information about plane configuration and comfort, it does not perform well on price or user wire (booking engine): Hotwire performed in the middle of the pack in this test, and it also offered a poor user experience that slowed down the fare search process. Expedia/Travelocity/Orbitz (booking engine): While Expedia/Travelocity/Orbitz does include baggage feeds in its results, it struggled to find good fares for itineraries that were off major iceline (OTA): Priceline often served the worst fares out of all search sites tested, and Priceline also does not offer low-cost airlines in its results.
JTB: Finding the Lowest Fares
At JTB Business Travel, we can be your partner as you search for the lowest possible air fares. Not only do we provide online and mobile booking, we also offer a low price guarantee — you’re assured of getting the best fares when you choose JTB as your business travel agency.
Contact us today about our comprehensive services and how we can help you secure the best air fares possible.
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How to Create a Travel Aggregator Website | Import.io
No matter the time of year, people are often looking to travel. The long summer months prompt travelers from all over the world to head to exotic locales and live new experiences. During the cold winter months, many people will head home for holiday celebrations or seek someplace warm to get away from it all. No matter how you look at it, traveling is a big business, and much of the preparation for a trip, big or small, happens online. The opportunities to attract new audiences are there, so grabbing their attention through a travel aggregator website can be viewed as a smart move.
What is a Travel Aggregator Site?
A travel aggregator is a website that finds availabilities and prices of travel offers across many sources and aggregates them all in one place. This helps users find the best prices out of all of the results the aggregator found. That way, it’s easy for consumers to know that they are booking at the lowest price.
Travel aggregator websites are very much like content aggregators, only focused on traveling. They take data from a variety of sources stretching across the internet and place it in one easy-to-access site for visitors to use. Some of these sources can come from airline companies, hotels, and travel agencies, and they all serve to inform the site visitor about anything from plane tickets to upcoming forecasts.
You’re likely already somewhat familiar with content aggregators in general. They take content from the internet and put it on one site, usually focused around a single topic or subject. This saves visitors from having to go to every individual site about a subject and instead puts everything within reach. Think of it like a hub for a topic that searches the whole internet for the best material related to that topic.
It benefits both the original source and website aggregators. Both will receive traffic, provided the content is good. Some of the most popular content aggregation sites include Popurls, WP News Desk, and Alltop.
Content aggregation is extremely convenient for visitors, and this is where you can capitalize with a well-designed travel aggregator site of your own.
Creating a Travel Aggregator
Since you’re reading this article, you’ve probably made the decision to create your own travel aggregator website, but you’re not exactly sure how to do it. You already have the basic idea down — a focus on traveling — but after that, there are many more choices that need to be made. Every good site will need to start with a plan, and executing on that plan will in many ways be the key to success.
What to Include
One of the biggest decisions you need to make is what you want to aggregate from other travel sources. Do you want an aggregation site that focuses mainly on flights? That’s certainly possible and very helpful for travelers. There’s plenty of data available that you can aggregate. Or perhaps you’d like to be known as a flight and hotel aggregator. That would require getting data about hotels in all sorts of locations throughout the world.
Are you going to include other travel topics, like content from travel blogs? That’s another decision that has to be made. All of these decisions will affect how your website is put together as well as how audiences will think of it. Plan now for what you want, and you’ll be able to start building the site more efficiently with an effective course of action already in mind.
Build With a Foundation
You don’t have to look too far in order to get started on your travel aggregator site. You can begin with a foundation that has already worked well for a lot of people. That foundation is WordPress. It’s well known that WordPress is used for creating almost any kind of website you can think of, so it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that it can be used to create a travel aggregator site. Think of WordPress like a toolbox, one that comes with a variety of useful tools that can add to what you’re trying to build.
An example of one of those tools is called a theme. WordPress themes have popped up all over the place and can be used in a variety of ways. For your purposes, finding themes dedicated to travel will be the most beneficial. Take one theme for instance: Pilgrim. This theme is a flexible component that has a large number of free features such as custom fields, group buying engine, filtering by distance and geolocation, and much more. It’s a theme that has been designed specifically for use in all things travel-related. Using a theme like Pilgrim can help you get a head start on creating your travel aggregator website. You can add your own unique flourishes here and there as well, but a theme is a great foundation to build upon.
Going with WordPress themes are WordPress plugins. Plugins are components that are easy to add to your site that give it more capabilities that will impress audiences. A WordPress plugin like TourCMS has features which allow users to book online safely which can really help take an aggregator site to the next level.
Build Your Own
While WordPress is a solid foundation, you can always try to build your site from scratch. The main advantage to doing this is that you get to use your own style, ideas, and features. There’s no need to conform your vision to a pre-existing theme or plugin. The possibilities for what you can do are almost endless. There is a downside to this strategy, however. Building your own site from the ground up will take more time, and if you don’t have any developer experience, you’ll have to pay more. Even so, some of the drawbacks may be worth it if you want to execute on your unique take on travel aggregation.
Getting the Data
Building the site is only part of getting everything set up. You now need the fuel that will help run this vehicle, and that comes in the form of data. Aggregating that data will be a major part of what separates your site from others. One of the best ways to get data is through web scraping using web extraction services, like what is provided with
This type of tool will go through designated sites to extract vital data and collect them within your database. Unstructured data is turned into something you can use and present to visitors. This can happen automatically, so your site will always have the latest information. Having this feature is what will turn your travel aggregator website into a real destination for people wanting to find out more about their travel plans.
Like content and search aggregators, travel aggregators can be a valuable resource for people who are always on the go. Sometimes there’s just nothing like taking a nice vacation, but it can be tough to relax when expenses pile up and plans change. Your travel aggregator website can mean the difference between a stressful trip and one that people will talk favorably about for many years to come.
There are certainly challenges to creating an aggregator site, but the benefits of doing so can be very enticing. Follow the tips and advice given in this article, and you’ll quickly be on your way to providing something very useful and advantageous for those who are looking for travel information. Get started now and create something you’ll be proud of.
Learn more about how online travel companies are benefiting from ’s Web Data Integration by reading the solution brief.
Recommended Reading
Data Solutions For Online Travel: Make Decisions With All The Available Data
Web Data Can Answer The Hard Travel Business Questions
Improving Revenue Management KPIs in Online Travel with Web Data
The Pros and Cons of Booking With Fare Aggregators – JTB …
The Pros and Cons of Booking With Fare Aggregators
By | For Travelers | 2 comments | 31 October, 2019 | 0
This article was updated October, 2019.
The quest for cheap airline tickets can sometimes feel never-ending. And it often leads to this question: Do fare aggregators really find the cheapest flights? The answer is: sometimes. As with any flight-booking tool, fare aggregators come with their own unique pros and cons. Here’s a look at what a fare aggregator is, as well as the benefits and drawbacks each offers.
Fare Aggregators vs. Flight Booking Engines
When you think of a fare aggregator, you may be picturing Expedia, Travelocity or a similar site. But these are actually flight booking engines. There’s a fine line between fare aggregators and booking engines, but it’s an important distinction to make.
Booking engines like Orbitz, Expedia or Travelocity are basically search engines that find travel deals from airlines that agree to let their fares show in the results. In exchange for doing this heavy lifting, they charge a fee when you choose to book.
Fare aggregators are slightly different. They actually search the search engines, scouring the Internet more broadly to help pinpoint the very best deal possible. and are examples of fare aggregators — sites that are likely to share what you’ll find using booking engines, plus a multitude of other options that sometimes help reduce the cost of your trip. Fare aggregators charge a fee, too, but the additional savings you discover often cover this fee.
What Makes a Good Fare Aggregator?
What makes a good fare aggregator? First things first: helping you find the absolute cheapest airline tickets. But what helps a fare aggregator find this lowest-possible price? You’ll want to use a fare aggregator that is searching as many search engines as possible — casting the widest net, if you will.
There’s also user experience. You’ll want to use a fare aggregator that works quickly and that displays your options in an easy-to-understand manner. For example, you’ll want to be able to sort on different metrics, including number of stops, price, schedule, etc.
Some fare aggregators display cheap flight tickets that aren’t typically available to the public, and others allow you to search with vague dates — a function that helps you find the lowest fare from among multiple departure/arrival options. Each of these features makes for a more effective aggregator.
The Pros of Fare Aggregators
A good fare aggregator is a useful tool because it canvasses the greatest amount of options in search of the cheap air fare. You’re not always getting such a vast search when you choose booking engines or other flight search options.
Another benefit to using fare aggregators is that some focus on a specific type of travel. For example, looks at only international fares. This type of specialization is rare among other flight search options, but it can often yield a really affordable rate that you wouldn’t be able to secure otherwise.
The Cons of Fare Aggregators
Fare aggregators are only as effective as the search engines they are searching, so there’s no guarantee that you’re truly securing the lowest-possible rate. Also, some fare aggregators will prey on your desire for a low price by offering initial pricing at first, then upping the fare once you click through.
Fare aggregators are also imperfect in many ways. Some will bill a fare as non-stop even when the flight includes a stopover without changing planes. Of course, in this scenario, you’re technically getting a non-stop flight, but you still get all of the waiting and inconvenience of a multi-leg trip.
Ranking the 10 Best Airfare Search Sites
Frommer’s recently tested a number of different search sites, including both aggregators and booking engines. For each search site, they tested a blend of last-minute and well-in-advance flights traveling in and out of both major hubs and regional airports around the world. Here’s how different sites performed, starting with the best and working down to the worst:
Momondo (aggregator): Momondo easily beat the competition in this test, returning the lowest price 16 times out of a total of 25 searches. It also features a helpful, user-friendly yscanner (aggregator): Skyscanner is known as one of the first aggregators to include discount airlines, and it returned the lowest price several times during this Flights (aggregator): Google Flights couples incredibly fast performance with search results that include fares other sites have a hard time (aggregator): Kayak is one of the best-known aggregators, and it did well in this test at finding ways to shave a few dollars off what other sites returned as the lowest-cost flight. Hipmunk (aggregator): Hipmunk never returned the lowest fares compared to the other sites, but it did serve consistently low prices — and it scores highly for (booking engine): did well finding deals on last-minute international flights with plane changes, but it did not perform as well at finding good direct atguru (booking engine): While Seatguru does provide a wealth of information about plane configuration and comfort, it does not perform well on price or user wire (booking engine): Hotwire performed in the middle of the pack in this test, and it also offered a poor user experience that slowed down the fare search process. Expedia/Travelocity/Orbitz (booking engine): While Expedia/Travelocity/Orbitz does include baggage feeds in its results, it struggled to find good fares for itineraries that were off major iceline (OTA): Priceline often served the worst fares out of all search sites tested, and Priceline also does not offer low-cost airlines in its results.
JTB: Finding the Lowest Fares
At JTB Business Travel, we can be your partner as you search for the lowest possible air fares. Not only do we provide online and mobile booking, we also offer a low price guarantee — you’re assured of getting the best fares when you choose JTB as your business travel agency.
Contact us today about our comprehensive services and how we can help you secure the best air fares possible.
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By JTB Business Travel | Comments are Closed
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Frequently Asked Questions about travel fare aggregator
What is an aggregator in travel?
A travel aggregator is a website that finds availabilities and prices of travel offers across many sources and aggregates them all in one place. This helps users find the best prices out of all of the results the aggregator found. That way, it’s easy for consumers to know that they are booking at the lowest price.Apr 2, 2019
What is a fare aggregator?
When you think of a fare aggregator, you may be picturing Expedia, Travelocity or a similar site. But these are actually flight booking engines. … Booking engines like Orbitz, Expedia or Travelocity are basically search engines that find travel deals from airlines that agree to let their fares show in the results.
Is StudentUniverse a legitimate site?
Is StudentUniverse reliable & trustworthy? Yes! StudentUniverse is one of the world’s leading travel booking sites for students and young adults under 26. We are accredited by IATA – the International Association of Travel Agents and have an A+ rating from the BBB.