best online flight booking website?
I fly quite often and need good online flight booking website. I’ve tried couple of them and finally settled with Expedia (http://www.expedia.com/) Expedia offers really well thought out experience for choosing the best flight available.
It has all the basics that every flight booking website should have:
- it remembers your departure airport – as you usually start from same place in your travel
- it proposes reasonable flight dates for the trip – why it’s so difficult for most of the sites to place good default dates. It’s much easier to update some dates than type them from scratch.
- it has flight search featured prominently on the homepage – quick and easy to search
it allows you to order by price but also via flight duration and time of arrival/departures
It has couple of useful options that others can only dream of:
- it helps with misspelled airport names – do you always know how to spell Ljubljana when you need to go to this City in Slovenia?
- it can advice that there are better offers when flight is day before or after
- it can advice if there is possibility to fly to nearby airport instead
- it has (unfortunatelly US only) opportunity to search for best prices of flight when your dates are flexible – you can say – I want to go from place A to place B, when I should go so I get best offer
It’s really showcase of great user experience. Expedia has such good experience that I usually have better visibility for flight booking options there than professional travel agents.
It has all it needs for occasional traveler. Just some ideas for improvements for frequent travelers:
- would be great to have more details on the fare rules for advanced users (how flexible is the ticket, what’s the booking class)
- would be great to know what airline operates the flight for code shared flights – so I can avoid getting flights by Tyrolean Airlines even if book Austrian Air.
- would be great to have possibility to search using parameters of frequent flier program. So one can limit the search to airlines that are members of certain programs.
Do you use Expedia? Do you maybe use other online engine that offers even better experience? What are your experiences with flight booking systems? Your comments are very welcome!
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[...] In my blog among other things I do reviews of websites and pass my comments and ideas for improvement. I did review of Expedia website in article about best online flight booking website. It was about 2 weeks ago. Now (Aug-16) it’s on #4 place on Google for “best flight booking” search, #1 for “best booking engine” and in absolute top for many other related searches. Don’t be surprised when you see other results on Google now – Internet is ever changing. [...]
[...] Couple of days ago I’ve given you story of my article with review of Expedia website called best online flight booking website. It scored very well with Google and ranked very high in couple of important keywords. I did some tests and optimizations of this post to achieve high ranking in google and wrote post about my efforts. You can read my post on search engine optimization with Google. [...]
I wonder if you and people know that EXPEDIA is listed in the top ripoff link at the bad business bureau ( http://www.ripoffreport.com ) and has two “dedicated” websites due to poor customer support and lies: http://www.victimsofexpedia.com and http://www.shameonexpedia.com
Kind regards
I’ve reviewed it from perspective of webdesign and found it one of the best booking websites – it has excellent ability to browse and search for the best flight options. I don’t intend to comment of quality of their customer support. Best regards and sorry to hear about your troubles.
[...] One of the ways I use my blog is to test various search optimization techniques. I’ve written successful post with review of expedia as flight booking website and optimized it to get high ranking. I got pretty high in some good keywords and was playing with it a bit. I’ve written two other posts about my experience there – you can see them here and here. [...]
[...] blog as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) playground. I’ve written successful post with review of expedia as flight booking website and optimized it to get high ranking. I kept working on optimization until the moment that I [...]
Thanks for the information.
If you ever want to read a reader’s feedback
, I rate this article for 4/5. Decent info, but I have to go to that damn msn to find the missed bits. Thank you, anyway!
p.s. Year One is already on the Internet and you can watch it for free.
You did only search for the flight in Expedia, isn’t it?Buy a ticket from them and write after your travel..its different! Ranking the design of the site, sometime mislead people’s mind as if it was ranked on the quality & reliability!