Bought tickets to Moscow! We return at the very beginning of June, just in the summer (I hope it will come). We will fly to Moscow via Hong Kong, where we will stay for several days, because the tickets came out the cheapest. Plus Daria will rest a little and look at a new country for herself. I've already been there, still under the impression: Victoria Peak, Big Buddha, people, city...
But that's not what I wanted to talk about. What do you think is better Aviasales or Skyscanner? 🙂 Something became interesting to me, who uses what mainly, and it will be useful to collect all sorts of nuances in one place. Moreover, I just wanted to tell on a specific and fresh example the result of my search for air tickets.
The content of the article
- one Aviasales or Skyscanner
- 2 An example where both services helped
- 3 An example where both services have worked
Aviasales or Skyscanner
On my own behalf, I will say that I use both aggregators equally, Aviasales and Skyscanner. And applications on the phone are also from both search systems. And I fundamentally disagree with the fact that they are very different from each other in terms of prices or principles of work. All the difference, as a user, I see only in the interface, so I look at something in one, something in another. For the last 3 months I had to monitor a lot of different tickets. I was looking for tickets from Moscow to China, to Serbia and Sochi, recently I looked from China and Hong Kong to Moscow, and from Moscow to Simferopol. Before that, I repeatedly monitored tickets to Thailand and Poland ...
The maximum difference in the cost of tickets, I found, is 500 rubles, and often it even coincides up to a ruble, if you look at the same agencies. And I have never (not recently, not before) noticed that services remember cookies and begin to increase the price of tickets so that a person can buy more quickly. I opened another browser on purpose, cleared the entire cache with cookies (or turned on incognito mode) and the price was the same. Where this infa about cookies comes from, I have no idea. Maybe in some special directions that I have never flown? Or is it a widespread myth?
In SkyScanner, I like the search by month most of all, in my opinion the most convenient thing is there. You can open the calendar and immediately see on which day of the month the flight will be cheaper. True, this only applies to popular destinations, otherwise the calendar will be empty or half empty. I do not like the outdated data in Skyscanner when you go to the agency's website, and either there is no such flight at all, or the price is different. I've come across more than once already. How to book on Skyscanner.
In Aviasales, I like, first of all, manufacturability or something (all sorts of not very necessary, but cool chips like a map) ... and design. But I do not argue, this is all for an amateur. From the functional - compound routes and search for 3 days at once, when the service issues the cheapest ticket in the range of + -3 days. It is relevant when it is tied to dates, otherwise it is easier to use the Skyscanner calendar. Although ... Aviasales actually has two calendars: one is in the search results and it is visually not entirely obvious (I don't like it), and the second is a separate calendar on the main page, which, on the contrary, will be more convenient than SkyScanner's. In general, the essence of all these calendars, of course, is the same.. How to book on Aviasales.
An example where both services helped
Unfortunately, I don't have screenshots at hand, so I'll have to check for a word 🙂 Yes, I could now search for something in search engines, but this would not be a completely real example. So, but the real one is that tickets to China in February and March were bought just in agencies (and not through the websites of airlines), so it came out cheaper.
In February, I bought tickets for a direct flight Moscow-Sanya for Daria and Egor through Aviasales (at the Onetwotrip agency), and in March for a flight with a transfer from Moscow-Wuhan-Sanya for myself through Skyscanner (Svyaznoy Travel agency).
An example where both services have worked
Never forget to check the ticket prices on the websites of the airlines themselves! This time it so happened that I bought a Sanya-Hong Kong and Hong Kong-Moscow ticket exactly on the airlines' websites, because there were such fares that the search engines did not know about. To be honest, the first time I encountered this was when the difference was quite large. I was especially surprised by Transaero (Hong Kong-Moscow), because I have already bought tickets for this airline several times and it was always a little cheaper at the agency, or the same. Perhaps some kind of action that the search engines-aggregators are not aware of.
Hong Kong-Moscow
Added another screenshot of Momondo, since they also use it, and to make it more revealing.
Flight Hong Kong-Moscow on Aviasales for 42936 rubles for 3 tickets
Flight Hong Kong-Moscow on Skyscanner for 42936 rubles for 3 tickets
Flight Hong Kong-Moscow on Momondo for 42429 rubles for 3 tickets
Flight Hong Kong-Moscow on the Transaero website for 37616 rubles for 3 tickets
Sanya-Hong Kong
But with a ticket from HongKong Airlines on the go, there is nothing surprising. Apparently, Chinese airlines often do not give the cheapest fares to search engines. And the difference turned out to be significant, 8500 rubles for 3 tickets or 20,000 rubles.
The search engines behaved differently. Aviasales simply did not know about the cheap tariff, and Skyscanner did not know at the time of purchase, and when he took a screenshot, for some reason he began to show it, only cunningly. If you look at the screenshot, you can see that he offers to buy on the HongKong Airlines website for 8474 rubles, and in agencies from 7291 rubles. Only if you go to any agency, it turns out that this is the price for one person! That is, in total, for the price, everything is the same as for Aviasales. Not an honest approach.
Flight Sanya-Hong Kong on Aviasales for 21793r
Flights Sanya-Hong Kong at Skyscanner
Flight Sanya-Hong Kong on the HongKong Airlines website for 8500 rubles for 3 tickets
P.S. In any case, it is more convenient to search for tickets (flights) in metasearch engines, and not on crooked airline websites. Some are such that you just get tortured, horror! Yes, and much faster you get an idea of which airlines fly to the city you need. After all, I found the flights I needed in the search engines. And it's not difficult to figure out where it is more profitable to buy..
