Travelsupermarket Flights Review Analysis

The Travelsupermarket flight search engine is one of the most popular booking engines for trip planning in the UK right now. They are owned by the Moneysupermarket group and serve as their prime subsidiary focused on flights, hotels, holidays, travel deals and travel guides.

The site was one of the first in the UK to adopt the Meta search model of flight finding. i.e. searching multiple airlines and travel agents from  a single user query and displaying results in one window.

They are the number 9 site as far as traffic numbers are concerned – Hitwise reports that they control around 2.36% of the UK travel market with high visibility in major search engines.

The site was previously managed by Chris Nixon, brother of the founder of the Moneysupermarket group Simon Nixon. However, Chris Nixon left in December 2010 to join Kelkoo and become managing director of its flight and travel department for Europe.

Travelsupermarket have spent large sums of money on TV advertising in past years – with high profile campaigns featuring celebrities ranging from TV dragon Peter Jones to pop duo Jedward.

In this short article we look at some of the pros and cons of Travelsupermarket flights and suggest some ways for consumers to save even more when it comes to booking low cost flight deals online.

Pros of Travelsupermarket flights

Comprehensive flight search

Travelsupermarket have made a name for themselves with their fast and cheap flight results. Their results cover budget airlines as well as smaller flight consolidators. Results appear fairly quickly and flight details are easy to see and nicely laid out.

Multiple departure points

One of the most unique features of Travelsupermarket flights is that you can select up to three different departure airports for your flights. Alternate flights are shown in your search results if a cheaper route was detected from another flight route.

Flexible dates

Travelsupermarket has a nice function where you can select to see flights up to three days before and after your chosen departure date. This handy function allows you to see cheaper deals up to 1, 2, or 3 days depending on your chosen preference.

Cons of Travelsupermarket Flights

Filtering is not easy

Filtering flights in not immediately easy with Travelsupermarket flights. Most flight search engines have sliders where you can narrow down flight choices by departure times, providers, airlines and other factors. You cannot do this with Travelsupermarket flights. You are just presented with a long list of different flights for your route.

Price is not always accurate

A common problem that all Meta search engines face is the discrepancy between a flight price shown and a flight price on the actual booking site. Travelsupermarket flights are no different. The biggest annoyance for consumers is when a flight is displayed on Travelsupermarket’s site which does not exist in reality.

Not as flexible as some other search engines.

Even though travelsupermarket allows you to search up to three days before and after your chosen departure times it is still not that flexible in comparison to some of its competitors. Skyscanner for example shows flights for the entire month on popular routes and Kayak has a handy explore feature which shows the cheapest routes found by other visitors using their site.

Prices are not always the cheapest

Travelsupermarket does not always come up with the best price. It is not uncommon for another search engine to beat its price on the same day and on the same route. This boils down to the fact that different search engine’s compare different sites. One search engine may locate a flight through one of its search partners only for another search engine to miss it because they did not search that company. Other flight comparison sites that often beat Travelsupermarket are Skyscanner, Fly.com. Kayak, Mobissimo, Liligo and Dohop.

In conclusion

Travelsupermarket has a number of pros and cons to its flight search. We recommend using it in conjunction with a number of other search engines when it comes to looking for the cheapest flights online.

We would do not recommend searching Travelsupermarket alone if you are looking for the best deals online. As we have explained above Travelsupermarket’s rivals are often better on the same flight route.

We recommend a process of comparing multiple flight comparison sites.

In fact that is why we built our search engine to make this easy for you to do.

Simply fill out 1 form on our homepage to compare up to 16 of the best flight comparison sites including, Skyscanner, Kayak, Kelkoo, Liligo, Dohop, Fly.com and many more.

We wanted to include Travelsupermarket in our search as well but unfortunately they did not want to be shown head to head with other sites offering a similar service.

Do some comparisons yourself to see…

Why not give it a go now – cheapflightsfinder.com