Skyscanner and Aviasales are very popular resources around the world, commonly referred to as aggregators, because their main task is to provide a service for searching airline tickets. Basically based on the criterion of their cost. In our opinion, they are both very handy and deserving of all praise. Nevertheless, it will be very interesting to compare them and find out which of these resources – Aviasales or Skyscanner – really does a better job.
Skyscanner or Aviasales-which is better?
So, we’ve already mentioned that both of these resources, Aviascanners and Skyscanner, we are quite fond of. It is this close working relationship that allows us to state responsibly that it is not true to say there is a fundamental difference between the pricing policies of one resource and the other.
For us as users, the biggest difference between the two is the interface. And we’ve been noticing for a long time that these competing services are engaging in a kind of industrial espionage to get the best experience for their customers. They copy almost every new widget they see from each other.
Airfare-difference
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It just so happens that for the past few months we’ve had to monitor ticket prices almost continuously for flights from Moscow to Bangkok and in the opposite direction. At the same time we were playing around with flight options to Sochi, Serbia and Poland, and other countries. Well, the maximum difference in the price of tickets at Aviasales and Skyscanner aggregators during the entire period of observation was 500 rubles. And it was only once. On other days the difference was much smaller, and on some of them the price fluctuation did not exceed one ruble.
Use cookie to manipulate prices
. . What do we like about Skyscanner? For example, there’s an option to search by month. That’s an important advantage for us. After all, we can open the calendar and decide for ourselves when it is not only more convenient, but also cheaper to fly to, say, Thailand. But the relevance of this advantage is reduced to zero if you want to fly to unpopular Tmutarakan. For example, the information about flights to Zimbabwe appears not earlier than a week before departure. This is a major disadvantage of Skyscanner – its data may be outdated and does not correspond to the information available with the ticket agency. Read more about the advantages and disadvantages of this aggregator. . The AviasalesAviasales aggregator interface, in our opinion, is overloaded with interactive details. It’s full of widgets that are completely useless for searching for tickets, but they don’t really get in the way. But we really like the ability to choose the most convenient composite route, as well as the ability to search for five to six days in advance. This gives you a complete picture of the schedule of a single flight, depending on the days of the week. If you want to link to a flight by date, you can use the interactive calendar. Although the usefulness of this chip is almost the same on all the resources, there is not much to compare. We wrote about how to book flights on this resource here. To be completely honest, the claim that buying tickets through Skyscanner or Aviasales guarantees the lowest travel costs is not entirely true. If you go directly to the airline websites, you may find even better deals. For example, on the resource Transaero once we were able to buy tickets to Phuket at such a rate, which the search engines did not even mention – whether out of ignorance, or because of excessive cunning. The difference was so significant that the only reasonable explanation could be the company’s promotion. We do recommend these aggregators for ticket searches, however, because they have more information about logistics. You can only contact the airline if you know for certain that it is operating the flight you are interested in. For the average person who flies to distant lands once a year, this information is completely unnecessary and there is no way to keep it. You go to the aggregator site and get the most reliable information about the flights made by dozens, no, hundreds of companies. The functionality of these resources is specifically tuned to the search, and its developers and administrators tried to build it on the basis of the most common and popular searches. This allows you to save time and avoid annoying bugs. Agree, these terms are well worth paying for. Especially since the difference will be quite insignificant.
Aviasales observations
Worth buying tickets through these aggregators?