Travel

#Travel advice: the best flight comparison websites

Donald Strachan, Telegraph Travel's technology expert, compares the leading flight search websites to discover which finds the cheapest deals

12:40PM GMT 23 Jan 2014

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For anyone hunting the cheapest flights on the web, key bookmarks are the meta-search engines . These sites trawl airlines, online travel agents (OTAs) and flight-data wholesalers to find the best price. But which of them is the cheapest?

I selected 20 routes from Britain to long- and short-haul destinations, plus one internal flight in the United States and one between Australia and Asia. I mixed five different dates, ranging from a short-notice week away in February to a 20-night August trip. I searched for every flight on eight leading flight websites, rejecting prices if they were only available with crazy layovers or a circuitous route. In other words, I chose the cheapest sensible route.

Across my bundle of 20 flights, momondo (momondo.com ) was cheapest. Only an insignificant £100 in total separated the top three of momondo, Skyscanner (skyscanner.net ) and Kayak (kayak.co.uk ). TravelSupermarket (travelsupermarket.com ) almost matched the top three on 18 routes, but only offers flights that begin or end at a UK airport.

I took most searches through to the final stage before booking, to verify prices were live . In the past, flight engines often found prices that no longer existed when the traveller clicked through to pay. This happened only a couple of times in 160 searches.

The best sites usually match each other flight for flight, to within a few pounds. However, Kayak found a London Hanoi routing that was cheapest by £35; momondo beat all rivals by £40 on a Manchester to Nairobi flight in August. Kayak, Skyscanner, and momondo were among the quickest to return results, though every engine was slower than Google Flight Search (google.co.uk/flights ). The Google tool, however, was no match for the specialists when it came to finding the best prices. In fact, Google Flight Search came eighth in price performance, almost 12 per cent more expensive than momondo for my basket of 20 flights.