I am planning a trip to Delhi, Agra, Simla, and Manali in February. Around Feb 14 – my second wedding anniversary. We had decided to go by our own and not thorough any tour operator. I have booked all the hotels, train, plane tickets online. Sites like TripAdvisor and IndiaMike Travel Forum helped me a great deal on finalizing my itinerary and choosing hotels to stay etc.

The pain point was booking flights. Yes, almost every travel site around lets you search for fares across carriers and book flights and there are meta search engines like Ixigo for searching fares from multiple carriers but still booking flights – finding the best fare is no easy job! I had come across a comparison about online air fare search on Trak.in (A blog about business in India and one of my favorites) and the conclusion was – Ixigo was the best and offered the lowest fares. I had used Ixigo a couple of times and found it really to be the best. So when it came to booking our tickets for Delhi in February, I straightaway went to Ixigo and booked JetLite for 3200 per person. I paid 6400 for two of us.

Then came the fare cut and air tickets got cheaper. I again went on Ixigo and checked the prices, the ticket was now at Rs. 3000. Humm not so cheap I said to myself. Anyway it is always good to book tickets in advance because they get pricier with every passing day. So it was just a fluke that the Airlines decided to reduce fares.

Then came an offer on my mobile from Kotak Cards (I have one) about a Rs. 500 cash back on booking GoAir tickets on ViaWorld.in. My wife pressed me to go and at least check out the prices, to see if we can save a few bucks! (You know how women are when it comes to discount offers!) So I landed up on ViaWorld.in which was previous known as FlightRaja and checked the prices.

At first I went to Ixigo and checked the prices of GoAir – it was Rs. 2200! A good 1000 Rupees lower than what I had paid for JetLite. The day I had booked the tickets – GoAir was priced at the same rate as JetLite. I said to myself, If I cancel my JetLite ticket, I will pay Rs.750 as penalty. But here I am saving Rs.1000. Net savings will still be Rs. 250 and add to that Rs. 500 cash back on Kotak Card I will save good 750 Rs. BUT the same ticket was priced at Rs. 2950 on Viaworld where the offer was there on Kotak Cards. So I knew where the cash back was actually caming from – my own pocket!

And then I noticed a JetLite fare of Rs. 1665 on the same flight for which I had paid Rs. 3200 about a month back! I checked Ixigo and it was showing 2900. I checked JetLite’s site and the price was same as Ixigo. Ixigo actually pulls fares from Careers’ own sites. I checked Yatra and MakeMyTrip and prices were all around the same mark. The catch on ViaWorld was that the fare was non refundable, but I was fine with that. I have booked hotels, and everything and my journey is fixed. I am not going to cancel it. So I don’t mind paying for a non-refundable ticket. I calculated that if I cancel my JetLite ticket, I will pay 1500 in cancellation charges and I will get back 4900 back and if I buy this ticket from ViaWorld, I will pay Rs. 3330.   Savings of 1570! Same flight, same air line, and price is almost half of what I had paid earlier. I went ahead and booked it. For our return journey, I had booked tickets in Rajdhani Express @ 1500 per person. I canceled that as well and got air tickets for 1650. By paying Rs. 200 as cancellation charges to IRCTC and paying 300 extra for air tickets, I still saved Rs. 1000 overall and my journey both ways was now by plane.

If only I had checked Viaworld earlier, I would have saved around rs. 3000! Money that I paid in cancellation could have been saved!

Ixigo is a good fare search site but it is not the best. It takes fares directly from the careers. It is best to search other OTAs as well because like Via, they might have offers or special promotions going on on certain flights/airlines. Via was offering these non refundable tickets at half rate on JetLite. It was available only on ViaWorld.

Another thing is many of these sites have some kind of offer going on with some credit/debit card. I and my wife together hold credit cards from almost every card issuer in India and we use it to avail cash backs while buying online. I booked one hotel through MakeMyTrip using HSBC credit card because it had 7% cash back. I booked another hotel from TravelGuru because they had a better deal than the hotel itself!

So before you buy a ticket it is a good idea to check out multiple online fare search sites. Just for an experiment, I checked out 16 (yes sixteen) OTAs to compare the kind of fares they offer. test input was flight for Delhi-Mumbai on 31/1/2009. GoAir was lowest with around Rs. 2200 on most of the sites but the best deal was on Arzoo.com at Rs. 2018. Expedia had the highest “lowest” fare at Rs. 3009. But if you hold a Kotak Credit card, offer on Via was the best with a the GoAir ticket at Rs. 2227 and after 500 cash back you’d get it for Rs. 1727 – if you hold a Kotak Credit Card!

I guess we need a fare comparison service that searches for fares and offers across various OTAs. SearchMela offers something similar but the search is limited to 5 OTAs and it’s not very intuitive. You have to manually go on each site by opening each site and check for the fares yourself. It is like more of a one click search for multiple sites. Ideally it should be something like this – you enter your destinations and date, no of passengers etc and then the search engine searches all the 16 prominent fare search sites and gives you the lowest fare, and the site it was found on along with a nice summary of results found across sites. It also displays you if any promotional deals are going on on any sites and then you can chose to go to that site to book your ticket.

The 16 sites I am referring to are as follows. I have not included career’s own sites because Ixigo alone is enough for that.

• Ixigo
• MakeMyTrip
• Yatra
• TravelGuru
• ClearTrip
• Ezeego1
• Viaworld.in
• TravelChacha
• Arzoo
• Rediff Fare Search
• Indiatimes Travel
• Travelocity
• Expedia
• Zoomtra
• Wego
• Kayak

I wonder if someone would come up with such a service or should I spend a few weekends and try to do it myself!

The problem is these sites do not provide any APIs for third parties to query them. Some sites accept the search parameters from the query string so its easy to get the data from that site. Send a get request with query sting and parse the return HTML from the sever and find the lowest fare offered by that site. Some sites Have a post form and the results are displayed on a new page, but that again can be handled programmatically. Although it is trickier, it is doable. One might need write a special class with parsing logic for each site and put the results together. The problem is with the sites that get the data though Ajax. With some trick that can be reverse engineered but I am not very sure.

Another issue is will OTAs permit such a use of their services? If they do it will be really competitive scenario for them. And the guy with the best offer will take the cake. But no single OTA has best offer at all the times and on all the Airlines so it might just help them win some business when they have a good deal for customers. And what is a good dea may not be for another. Like in my test scenario – if you own a Kotak Credit Card then the buying GoAir from ViaWorld is the best deal for you. For otehrs booking through Arzoo is the best option.