This summer’s international flight prices are already beating out the past five years’ summer records.
U.S. travelers who booked travel to Europe for this summer shelled out an average of $1,100, while those visiting Asia paid a whopping $1,800 on average.
With flight prices sky-high, many travelers are taking extra steps in the travel planning process to make sure they’re getting the best deal. But which website should you trust?
Here are 5 online tools to search for the best flight deals this summer:
1. Google Flights
While its search engine foundation was originally built for travel agents, Google Flights is not an online travel agency. In other words, it doesn’t book your flights for you.
Instead, this search tool allows travelers to see all the fares available from airline websites together in one place, then book the ticket directly with the airline (or a third-party agency if you really like to flirt with danger).
Google Flights sets itself apart from its online competitors by offering the most customization options and detailed information without sacrificing user friendliness or readability. It’s also an industry leader in transparency, with the least hidden fees or surprise fare changes.
Google Flights has the clearest and most comprehensive flight price calendar, as well as the best judgment for ranking overall “best flight” options displayed first based on value and convenience.
Plenty of other search engines help you know the best time to book or inform you of price drops for planned trips, but Google Flights is the only one to offer travelers price alerts for their favorite destinations “at any time.”
While Google Flights doesn’t always list the cheapest price for every route, it ultimately provides the best flight deal by allowing travelers to search for multiple departure and arrival airports in the same search to find the cheapest route possible.
Another real money-saver is their new Price Guarantee feature, available on many U.S.-based flights, which refunds customers the difference between their Google Flights fare and any future price drop that may occur.
Of course, no resource is perfect. Google Flights can be slow to update, sometimes lagging a few minutes or hours behind the airline price. It’s missing prices for a few key carriers like Southwest, AeroMexico, Turkish Airlines, and a significant percentage of major Asian airlines.
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2. Momondo
This hybrid online travel agency and search engine offers lots of granular information all in one page, including route-specific delay probabilities and duration, and summaries of airline health precautions, and baggage policies at first glance.
Momondo’s main advantage comes from using drop-down options to display the nitty gritty details of each flight option on the main results page while still in comparison mode.
Unlike Google Flights, there’s no need to toggle out of the main results page to a flight-specific detail viewer to fully zoom in on a particular route. Momondo’s “When To Buy” feature is also a highly visible and easily understandable cue for searching travelers waffling on whether to buy or wait.
Unfortunately, all this extra knowledge comes at the price of loading speeds and the loss of complex multi-city flight building.
One additional drawback is that Momondo gets the cheapest prices by displaying a large percentage of self-transfer flights and questionable third-party offers in its top search results.
Best practice for smoothly handling itinerary changes, cancellations, and delays is to book with the airline directly, which gives Google Flights the edge over Momondo here.
3. Skyscanner
The best way to nab an epic flight deal is to go where the fares are lowest. Skyscanner does just that – and takes the guesswork out of it.
For example, a New Yorker looking to get out of town as soon as possible could use the “Go Anywhere” function for the month of June to find last-minute round-trip fares under $400 for destinations across the Caribbean, Latin America, Scandinavia, and the UK.
Travelers can enter an entire country into the search box for both arrival and departure rather than individually selecting and re-searching cities. Skyscanner handles this country-wide search function more accurately than even Google Flights.
Unlike Momondo, Skyscanner helps out travelers by displaying a star rating for third-party travel agencies listed in the search results, which can hopefully help prevent travel disasters due to unreliable middlemen agencies.
4. Hopper
Hopper is a great mobile app for finding the most affordable routes on the best travel dates and purchasing them at just the right time to get their cheapest price tag.
Travelers love Hopper’s accurate price predictions that help them know the most affordable time to buy a particular ticket, as well as cheap and convenient price freezing.
What really makes Hopper stand out from the crowd is its mobile-friendly flight-searching tool. Google Flights isn’t as user-friendly on mobile, while searches on Momondo and Skyscanner’s mobile apps drag on at a snail’s pace and lack some of their advantages without their interactive map functions. By comparison, Hopper is made for mobile, and it shows.
5. Going
Mistake fares are exactly what they sound like. Airlines make pricing mistakes due to human error, technological glitches, or miscalculated currency conversions.
“We’re talking $23 roundtrip to Puerto Rico, $63 roundtrip to Chile, or $249 roundtrip to Europe in business class,” according to Going’s website.
Formerly known as Scott’s Cheap Flights, Going offers free and paid memberships for travelers to receive emails with the best mistake fare steals in real-time.
It’s not just about low fares, though. Before they ping you with a ticket price missing some zeros, Going determines whether the flight is convenient enough (non-stop or a reasonable connection) to be genuinely good value.
For more spontaneous travelers, Going can provide the most unbelievable flight deals this summer.
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This article originally appeared on TravelOffPath.com
Appeared first on: traveloffpath.com
