Section 02 · Who decides what you see
Comparison engines and alert services that never sell you the room but decide which seller you see first. We test coverage, price accuracy, and how clearly each one discloses that its ranking is paid for.
Ranked
Ties are broken by publication date. A score reflects the platform as reviewed; terms change, so check the operator before you pay.
The first tab to open for any hotel search, and the only metasearch that routinely shows you the hotel's own rate next to the resellers'.
It sells nothing, ranks by price rather than commission, and surfaces the direct rate alongside the OTAs. That combination has no equal — and one structural problem.
The best tool in existence for deciding where to go, and a reliable one for finding out who sells the ticket once you know.
Type a departure airport, leave the destination blank, and let the prices decide. Fifteen years on, no competitor has matched it.
The best-run flight deal service in the market, sold to a smaller audience than its marketing suggests: people who can book a trip because a price appeared.
The deal alerts are real and the mistake fares are occasionally extraordinary. Everything depends on whether you can actually take the flight it finds.
The power user's flight search. Use every filter it gives you, then read the seller name before you click through.
Nobody slices a flight search more precisely. The trouble starts when the cheapest result belongs to an online agency you have never heard of.
A cleaner, calmer KAYAK that occasionally surfaces a fare KAYAK misses. Worth thirty seconds as a second opinion; not worth being your first.
Same parent company, same underlying search, different front end. momondo's is friendlier — and occasionally returns a fare its sibling does not.
Read the three-star reviews and ignore everything else on the page, including the ranking, the badges and the booking buttons.
A billion contributions is a genuine asset. The ranking that sits on top of them, and the commercial layer wrapped around both, is where the trouble is.
A comparison engine whose ordering is bought, competing against a free tool that shows more and hides less.
The index is enormous and the comparison is genuine. But the deal ordering is an auction, the direct rate rarely appears, and Google does the same job better for free.
