how to find the

Cheapest Airfares

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Visit TravelProducts.com for more travel accessories.

Airfare Search Engines Compared

Includes Southwest Airlines

Searches for flexible dates (i.e., doesn't make you put in specific dates)

Shows total travel time when there's a layover

Finds cheap fares for one-way travel

Handles multi-city trips

Searches for alternate airports w/cheaper fares

Travelocity

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Click "More Search Options"

Searches for flexible dates easily (finds the best fare available and then tells you what dates you can fly to get that fare). Click on "flexible dates" to access this feature.

Sidestep

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More fares than anyone, since it includes Orbitz! Use this unless your dates are flexible or you're traveling between more than two cities.

Orbitz

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More features than anyone: Flexible date finder, multi-city search, total time for multi-leg trip, shows prices by airline *and* number of stops, lets you request special meals, and lets you pick the exact seat on the plane(!).

Qixo

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$10 fee for each fare booked. No advantage that I can see over the three better engines I list above.

Hotwire

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Requires log-in before showing fares; requires purchase before showing airline or flight times. Sometimes good for last-minute fares that the other sites don't show.

Southwest

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An individual airline, not a search engine, but we're listing them separately because the search engines above don't include their flights, and because their fares are often cheaper than what you can find in those engines.

Best Fares

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GOOD: Like Travelocity, they show the best fares without your having to put in specific dates. And they show fares for Southwest, while Travelocity doesn't. BAD: Site is incredibly slow, access to very best fares requires $60 membership fee whose price is hidden behind several screens. Doesn't provide one-way fares.

 

Travelocity is our favorite because it easily searches for flexible dates. (It finds the cheapest possible fare between two cities, and then tells you what days you can fly to get that fare -- saving you money if your travel dates are flexible.) In fact, Travelocity pioneered this feature. Of course, if you must travel on specific dates then Travelocity will still find the best fare it can for those dates. Unfortunately, Travelocity doesn't include flights on Southwest Airlines even though Southwest is the low-price leader in certain markets. A similar site is Best Fares, which does include Southwest flights, but Best Fares is very slow and access to the very best fares requires a $60 membership fee.

SideStep has more fares than anyone -- they even search Orbitz for you! They're the best to use if your dates are fixed and you're not flying between more than two cities, because they don't offer flexible dates or multi-city fares. (For flexible dates and multi-city trips use Travelocity.) Also, SideStep doesn't check fares at Southwest, so do check Southwest manually to see if they can beat whatever you find on SideStep.

Orbitz. Orbitz is a joint effort by five major airlines and shows airfares from a whopping 450 airlines, though SideStep took a lot of that wind out of Orbitz' sails by including Orbitz' results in its own results. But Orbitz offers lots of things that SideStep doesn't, like flexible dates and multi-city trips. Orbitz also conveniently shows groups the results by both the airline and the number of stops in the same table, and it shows you the total duration of a multi-leg trip -- something no other engine does (at the time of this writing). Orbitz also lets you specify special meal preferences and even lets you pick which seat on the aircraft you want(!). Downsides: Like most other engines they don't list fares from Southwest Airlines. Also, according to a reader, they don't accept credit cards from outside the U.S. Orbitz' flexible-date feature isn't quite as easy to use as Travelocity's. If it were then Orbitz would be our #1 choice for flexible dates. We still use Orbitz as a backup to see if it beats whatever fare we found on Travelocity.

Qixo searches several sites for you (Travelocity, Cheap Tickets, individual airlines, etc.) so you don't have to visit each. This was a great idea until it was pretty much rendered obsolete by Orbitz, which is run by the airlines themselves. These days you're hard pressed to get a better deal with Qixo than with Orbitz, and Orbitz is faster, easier, and has more features to boot. Another downside of Qixo is that they don't have a phone number for customer service -- you have to contact them through email or the "live chat" feature on their website. Qixo used to have the distinction of being the only engine that included flights from Southwest Airlines, but alas, they don't include Southwest any more. Qixo was our favorite long ago (circa 2001), but the competition has now surpassed them.

Hotwire. When there are unsold seats on a flight airlines will offer them at a substantial discount at the last minute (a couple of days to a week before the flight leaves). You have to be flexible with your itinerary, but if that's you, you can score amazing cheap airfare this way. Most search engines don't have access to these special, suddenly-discounted flights, but Hotwire does, so Hotwire can often find you a much better deal than the others. (We got Texas to California RT airfare at the last minute for only $250 with only one connection; this route was being sold for at least $600 everywhere else, including Travelocity. We also got Baton Rouge to Miami one-way for just $152 with only four days' advance purchase.) One catch: You pick the days you want to travel, but Hotwire picks the flight times for you, and you can't see them until AFTER you've purchased your ticket. Same deal on the number of connections -- there could be a lot.

Kayak is nice by assuming you want to search nearby airports (without making you go to a separate screen to select that option), and giving you a nice list of the prices for each airport it finds (rather than dumping all the results together). It's kind of slow, but not only is the nearby-searching feature nice, it also found our sample fare for $12 cheaper than Orbitz.

There are lots of other websites, but we don't list them all because we're focusing on quality, not quantity. If you know of a really good site that we don't list here feel free to let us know about it, but please make sure you're able to tell us why it's better than at least one of the sites we already list.

Regardless of which site you use, make sure you check out our Tips for getting cheapest airfares.

Find which travel days are cheapest
If your travel dates are flexible, just enter the cities you're flying between and let Travelocity find which days are cheapest to fly. Being flexible with your travel dates is our #1 tip for getting the cheapest airfare.
Travelocity.com

More features than anybody
Flexible dates, multi-city trips, shows total duration for multi-leg trip, lets you specify special meals, and lets you pick the exact seat on the plane(!). What more do you want? Recommended by Michael Bluejay.
Orbitz.com

If you liked my guide to Cheap Airfare, you might like some of my other sites:

 

how to find the

Cheapest Airfares

a public service of MichaelBluejay.com | Contact me

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