You've picked your next vacation spot, and it's time to look into flights. Where do you begin? The best flight search engines, like Google Flights, Kayak, and Skyscanner, let you create one search and see flight options from many airlines, simplifying the process. In most cases, you book directly with the airlines, removing third-party issues that can arise if you need to make changes to a ticket. These aggregators harness historical data and AI to help you snag the best deal and alert you if the price drops. Each offers a bit of a different product, which we explain below.
Google Flights
In the 1990s, a company called ITA built the first flight search engine called QPX to help travelers find the lowest fares. Today, it has evolved into Google Flights, a robust, user-friendly search engine that is the best across the board for researching flight options. You can use a set of filters to narrow down your options —say, by time of departure, number of stops, or by airline alliance —and you can even track pricing to see if it drops over time.
If you're planning a trip based on cheap airfare rather than selecting a destination first, Google Flights can help you there, too. Simply leave your destination open-ended when searching for flights, and Google Flights will show you a map of airfare prices across the globe.It also has a price graph to help you narrow your search for inexpensive flights even further. With a recent upgrade, Southwest flights now appear on Google Flights searches, so you can compare its prices with those of other carriers.
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Kayak
Kayak hits all the highlights of major metasearch engines, such as search filters and price alerts, and it also includes Southwest flights. Kayak's Baggage Fee Assistant is particularly helpful as it shows you flight prices with baggage fees included. Hacker Fares allows you to price one-way fares on separate airlines that may be cheaper than booking round-trip tickets with a single airline. Kayak also rolled out a price-checking tool that uses the power of AI to check that you're getting the best deal. You can upload a screenshot of your flight booking, and PriceCheck will search the competition to ensure no cheaper flights are available.
Momondo
A sibling site of Kayak, Momondo offers pretty much all the same services, including Hacker Fares and the inclusion of Southwest flights. What we like best about Momondo is that it automatically shows you prices for the days before and after your target travel dates, which could help you snag a deal. It also offers flight insights between your origin and destination, including stats like the cheapest month, day of the week, and time of day to travel. Overall, it's a very user-friendly site in terms of design, letting you easily avoid short layovers and specific types of aircraft.
Skyscanner
Skyscanner is a classic flight metasearch engine, but it has some particular strengths over its competitors. First, it has a cheapest month feature that can help you pick the best time to visit a destination based on airfare. Second, it can be better than competitors at finding the lowest prices for last-minute flights. And third, it includes some smaller online travel agents (OTAs), which may help you find even lower prices than what's offered by the larger OTAs like Hotwire and Priceline. But a word of warning: We don't recommend booking flights through OTAs. If something were to go wrong — a flight delay or a canceled flight, for instance — the airline won't be able to help you find a solution, and you'll have to work with your OTA instead.
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Expert Flyer
True to its name, Expert Flyer is best for seasoned air travelers. While this tool has limited free features like Seat Alert, which notifies you when your preferred seat opens up, a paid membership is necessary to access its full search functionality. It's particularly handy when searching for award fare availability, but most suitable for savvy frequent fliers, as it requires pretty substantial airline knowledge to maximize its use. Plus, the user interface isn't the most intuitive.