Discount Travel Sites “Cheap Flights” Like Expedia Flights Not Cheapest and Not Authorized Says News Report - 2,203 Views, 3 Comments
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We’ll bet that when you are looking for discount travel - especially discount air travel, and cheap air fares and cheap flights - that you turn to discount travel sites, such as Expedia, right? But while the Expedia travel site purports to offer cheap air flights - and sucks people in with the promise of cheap air plane tickets - Expedia airfare isn’t always the cheapest - people just assume that Expedia flights are less expensive! Worse, Expedia flights are sometimes not authorized at all, meaning that Expedia does not have a relationship with - let alone permission from - the airline to offer those cheap airfare tickets! Your effort to get cheap air fare could backfire, and you’ll have paid more than if you’d just gone directly to the airline! Bottom line? For cheap airline flights, instead of relying solely on discount travel sites (cheap plane flights are one of the primary things for which people use sites such as Expedia travel), go directly to the airlines and ask them about their cheap flights! While it may seem as if we are picking on Expedia, there’s a reason - Expedia was the one specifically fingered in a news report this week, in which EasyJet has accused the UK branch of Expedia of selling EasyJet flights without permission. According to an EasyJet spokesperson, Expedia “has no business relationship whatsoever” with EasyJet, yet despite being warned off by EasyJet, Expedia continues to sell EasyJet flights - at an increased cost to the customer. “We have written to Expedia and asked them to stop selling flights. They are currently doing so without our express permission”, and “legal action could follow,” said the EasyJet spokesperson. The EasyJet spokesperson also explained to the British news outlet the Register, that the way that Expedia and other discount travel sites grab flight information without permission is by grabbing the information “from the airline’s website using a ’screen scraper’, a method in which a computer program extracts data from the display output of another program.” In short, while customers believe that these discount travel sites such as Expedia have a warm and fuzzy (or just voluminous) relationship with all of the airlines, and so are able to offer deeply discounted airfares, in fact they may not only have no relationship whatsoever with the airline, but they may even be scraping the airline’s flight information without permission, and then jacking up the prices for the flights to the customer! In the end, the customer is paying extra for the convenience of going to a single site to check on all the flights available and their fares. If you are willing to pay Expedia or other discount travel sites for that convenience, then by all means do so. But go with eyes wide open, and don’t believe that you are getting a better fare than if you went directly to the airline. Because you probably aren’t (after all, Expedia needs to make money too, don’t they? And if the best fare they can get is the same fare you could get yourself from the airline’s site - having scraped the fare from the airline’s site - it only stand to reason that they will have to boost that fare to make money on your booking.) Bottom line? If you want the best fares, check with the airlines after you figure out who flys where you are going. 
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Expedia has a long story of cheating people (click on my name/URL to read hundreds of stories , including my case that proves EXPEDIA is a scammer). The “EasyJet” affair is just another example of their unethical business practice.
Comment by John — 6/27/2008 @ 8:52 am
“but i saw it on the telly”, sorry mate, but television adverts are populated with the same mob of petty hustlers and con men as everywhere else. another thing that might bear looking into is the “cheap hotel rates” mob, i’d suspect its more of the same.
“gunner”
Comment by "gunner" — 6/30/2008 @ 11:04 am
I’ve found that the best site to use when looking for low airfares is http://www.kayak.com. It’s a metasearch engine that searches not only the “cheap fares” sites like Orbitz, Expedia, CheapSeats, etc., but also searches the airline sites as well. They do not sell the tickets, but point you to the site where you can buy a ticket–usually, for me, the airline site.airlines
Comment by Dick — 6/30/2008 @ 1:55 pm