Frommer’s regularly pits the best airfare search engines, aggregators, and booking sites against each other in a battle royale to see which can find the lowest price on more than two dozen identical searches for flights.
This year’s results bring new discoveries. We are excited to announce that none of our new top three—the best of the best—is a household name. We are equally excited to discover that if you’re specifically looking for a last-minute deal on airfare, a fourth website, one that’s not even in our top three, is the best choice. And two former airfare search sites fell out of our Top 10 entirely: This year, both Booking.com and FlightNetwork failed to take off.
As for the rest of our Top 10, each one has its pluses and minuses, which we’re about to reveal in our reviews below.
On this year’s list, two sites that previously languished in the bottom half of the reviews have upped their games and zoomed into the top ranks—and one former low performer improved so much that it nabbed the top slot.
A word on our methodology
We also required realistic results, so we ignored low fares that would be miserable to fly due to excessively drawn-out layovers, too many stops, or flying long detours just to change planes. Basically, we rejected any itinerary that increased total travel time by more than half. Airlines may think those are viable plans, but we don’t.
Finally, we applied a rigorous, weighted scoring system that rewarded three points to any airfare search site that found the best fares, two points for second-best, and so on. We also penalized sites with negative points if the price proved to be higher than the average result from all the other competitors. Fares within 1% of one another were considered equal.
A few things to keep in mind
• An aggregator is only as good as the OTAs it canvasses. There are booking engines that sell tickets directly (Hotwire, Kiwi, CheapOAir, etc.). And then there are aggregators, which are sites that do not book tickets but instead search dozens of other booking engines, airfare sites, and OTAs (online travel agencies) and compile the results in one place; travelers then click through to their selection to make the actual purchase on the third-party site that’s actually selling it.
Some of the booking sites that aggregators show you are safer than others. All quality aggregators will remove unreliable ticket sellers from their searches, but problems can slip through. As you should do when you are referred to any unfamiliar company, always do a quick Better Business Bureau check for an unfamiliar airfare seller and search for complaints and red flags.
Also, some OTAs are prone to dangling lead prices a few bucks below what they will actually offer once you click through, and some misleadingly categorize “direct” flights—which do actually stop, but don’t require you to change planes—as “nonstop.” Because prices can change from moment to moment, even the most honorable aggregator may lead you to a site where you can’t find the airfare you were originally quoted. When that happened to us frequently in our review tests, we let you know.
#10: Google.com/flights
Google may be the Titan of online search, but it fumbles when it comes to airfares.
Google does have some things going for it. It’s fast, refreshing results even as you key in destinations or change filters. It displays average prices on a popup calendar when you’re choosing dates so you can see at a glance the cheapest days to fly. And in the spring of 2024, it was the first to show Southwest Airlines’ once-proprietary airfares among its airfare search results.
So why is the mighty Google at the back of the pack?
Its price results were all over the place. It found the best fare a grand total of one time, flying from Miami to Rio—but four of our top five sites matched it. Then it tanked on rooting out the absolutely lowest fares for two major routes: NYC to Paris and LA to Hong Kong. Its results for pricier direct flights on those itineraries were just average.
Google frequently found the exact same flight as many other sites did, but at prices just a little bit higher—often just 5% to 15%, but in some cases bafflingly higher, like the last-minute Dallas-Dubai jaunt on Emirates; Google wanted $673 more than our price champion for that flight, and around $250 more than several other sites found.
In summary, Google is great for finding available flights, but it’s better ignored when it comes time to actually buy them.
# 9: Hotwire.com
OTA
After quietly doing away with its Hot Rates (deeply discounted opaque airfares), Hotwire fell out of our ranking after 2017. Now it’s back, but with a huge caveat: Never use Hotwire for last-minute fare.
Hotwire performed, by far, the worst of any site we tested at last-minute prices, chalking up the highest airfare a whopping six times. The two better-than-average rates it did find were balanced out by a pair of worse-than-average ones on other itineraries.
Hotwire made up some ground by being flatly average when it came to booking farther in advance. It never found the cheapest overall fare, but it often nabbed lower or even the lowest rates on direct flights.
Beyond that, it failed pretty hard, and we think we know why. Hotwire was the only site that missed big chances to bring no-frills carriers into the mix. On New York–to-Paris, it found a decent $745 fare on Scandinavian, albeit with a stopover—but everyone else found a direct Flybee flight for even less ($666–$687). The best Hotwire could muster for a direct flight: $987 on Norse.
More egregiously, because Hotwire only searches one airport at a time by default, it missed lots of cheaper no-frills flights that were available at nearby alternate airports. Because of that blind spot, Hotwire insisted on a British Airways fare for our London-Barcelona hop that actually cost around four times more than booking a combo of no-frills RyanAir, easyJet, and Vueling from other airports in London—a tactic every other site knew enough to include in results. Hotwire pulled the same face-plant on last-minute fares on the same route; the Air France tickets it offered us cost twice as much as the low-cost carriers in that scenario.
Another mark against Hotwire is its poor set of filters. Along with other problems, it offered no way to indicate a maximum total flight time or layover duration you’d be willing to deal with. That’s pretty much a standard sidebar slider everywhere else. We did like the way its showcases, above the results, how much it would cost to fly on three days to either side of your chosen date.
By the way: If you’re wondering why Expedia (and its corporate siblings, Orbitz and Travelocity) is not on this list, it is because those results are all right here in Hotwire. Expedia now just uses the Hotwire engine for its airfare functions, so if you search Expedia now, you’ve searched Hotwire.
#3: Skiplagged
Aggregator
Skiplagged, a decade-old upstart, is problematic if you don’t know how to use it. It became famous for its “Hidden city” fares, which are tedious to explain but boil down to this: They’re itineraries that break the airlines’ rules, so they’re too risky for us to recommend. They can sometimes cost less, but you don’t get to check any luggage. Accepting a hidden city fare can results in pricey consequences or even lawsuits if you’re caught.
But Skiplagged gives you the option to exclude this controversial type of airfare by unchecking the SKIPLAGGING box, which we did for all of our tests.
Once we omitted hidden city fares, Skiplagged turned out to be strong on direct flights. Our top three sites were pretty much neck-and-neck when it came to pricing, so Skiplagged’s ranking came down to other features. Its delightfully simple graphic interface lets you compare, at a glance, the lengths of trips, including layover durations. When you enter a departure airport or city, the arrival is defaulted to “Anywhere;” if you leave it that way, you get a page of photos with prices for a bunch of tempting getaways.
Skiplagged’s popup calendars show how much the flight costs on each day over two months, so you can easily see how tinkering with the departure or return can save you money. (On the two sites that placed higher in our review ranking, this feature only indicates price ranges, not precise fares).
We do have a few criticisms. Sometimes Skiplagged sent us to questionable OTAs to make purchases, and we sometimes found prices were actually higher once we clicked over. Skiplagged also lacks robust filters, doesn’t disclose baggage fees, and rounds down all the prices—that last complaint is minor since we’re only talking about a few cents, but just feels sneaky.
#2: Skyscanner
Aggregator
Skyscanner remains one of the best performers on price and essentially tied with #3, Skiplagged, in the lowest fares on advance purchase tickets. Something else it shares with Skiplagged: mediocre filters.
Skyscanner was merely average on last-minute bookings.
This year, Skyscanner still earned the edge for a few reasons. You can choose “Explore everywhere” as your destination to get a nice grid of destinations at the cheapest cost. Unlike a similar feature at Skiplagged, which is constrained to North America, if you keep scrolling down on Skyscanner, you will get destinations on other continents as well.
One big plus: Skyscanner includes a star rating for all third-party booking sites (and how many users rated it), which helps travelers vet unfamiliar sites.
Skyscanner also offers the option to include nearby airports and to search for destinations in an entire country rather than just a city. While the initial popup calendars for travel dates do not show, as do some others, the precise prices to fly on alternate days, they do indicate each day’s relative cost category via a color code. Then, once you get to the results page, the tiny “Show whole month” link at the top will provide a page with two months’ worth of estimated prices.
Pros: Excellent results, especially on advance-purchase tickets; a variety of prices for the same flight from multiple OTAs/airline sites; two months of fares for flexible dates; searches nearby airports; notes codeshares; can find lowest fares to many destinations at once
