Last week I spoke at the Education Travel Conference in Providence, Rhode Island. One of the most fascinating people I met was Martin Lumbye, who helped build a meta-search engine called Momondo. Not many Americans have heard of it because they are a small Danish company but they're beginning to get the notoriety they deserve from major U.S. travel publications. What sets Momondo apart from other search engines like Kayak, is that the results are unbiased and they show fares from budget carriers like Southwest Airlines and Ryan Air. The other websites usually only show the deals they make a cut from. Momondo even takes it a step further by displaying deals from small ‘mom and pop' travel agents and thousands of European high-speed train routes. Martin says Momondo provides this kind of information because they're trying to build a loyal customer base and with service like this – they're going to be very successful. I'm a fan.
Although I'm a big fan of Momondo, I still check out all the travel sites because there's not one search engine that always has the absolute lowest price. So you have to spend time shopping around. I usually do a search on the search engines on my websites, JohnnyJet.com (powered by BookingBuddy) and AirlineNumbers.com (powered by OneTime.com). I like the latter because I'm impatient and I can just input my city pairs and the date and check mark the boxes of the all the websites I want searched (like Expedia,
Travelocity,
Orbitz,
...) and click 'search'. They all pop up at once and I can quickly compare prices. In addition, I cross-reference the lesser-known search engines like DoHop.com. DoHop's flight search contains flight schedules of more than 600 airlines and quickly calculates all possible routes and connections for a given trip. It then checks airlines and travel agent websites for fares and provides links to their site. The traveler then books directly with the airline or travel agent.
