If you’re booking a trip online, chances are expedia.Com (free) is one of the your first stops—and with good reason. Founded 15 years ago by microsoft, used by tens of millions of consumers, and stocked with everything from car rentals to cruises, expedia is a trusted one-stop shop. For international packages in particular, deals abound. And despite its longevity, expedia boasts a friendly and modern website, an excellent mobile app for iphone users, and partnerships with sites you know and love, including tripadvisor, hotwire, and pronto.
While there’s little wrong with expedia, its fierce competition reveals its limitations. Travelocity (free) has produced a customer bill of rights. Orbitz (free) includes automatic price assurance to guarantee the lowest airfare. And priceline (free) has innovated with the poker-faced name your price offer. While, in my experience, all the search engines return roughly similar results—a full comparison to follow—expedia hasn’t quite innovated to the extent of some of its competitors. This does not diminish the fact expedia is a fine choice, worthy of its leadership position in internet-based travel reservations; rather, it simply means consumers have plenty of excellent options.
The Site
Expedia deserves credit for its colorful, accessible, and eminently functional website. Be it vivid images, rollover tabs, or social networking integration—Facebook, in particular—Expedia feels young and lively despite its relative seniority. I tested Expedia by searching for flights and building vacations; I loved how easy Expedia made it to upgrade a flight to a vacation.
I began by searching for flights alone, but found it easy to bundle a flight with accommodations by clicking a link tacked to the bottom of each result. You can repurpose departure and arrival information for both flights and flights with hotels using one of two big, bright dedicated buttons.
Unlike younger travel sites, which use predictive text, expedia shows its age in airport searches. If you haven’t memorized your airport codes, chances are the site will kick you to a second page where you manually select airports. For example, expedia wasn’t smart enough to assume that “nyc” or “new york” denoted “all new york airports.” once your airports are set, expedia smartens up, saving your search parameters and localizing homepage travel deals based upon your departure airport.
The Flight
Expedia return the search results quickly, though not quite as swiftly as orbitz. By default, flights are listed by lowest price, though you can sort by number of stops, duration of flight, or departure and arrival times. There’s also a matrix—similar to that of orbitz—that visualizes the best deals by carrier and number of layovers (i honestly don’t know how it can take two stops to travel from new york to portland, maine). Expedia—like everyone else other than kayak (free)—plays it loose when it comes to telling you the final cost of your trip. The actual price is listed in a considerably smaller font than the price before taxes and fees.
This isn’t to say that expedia doesn’t deserve recognition for disclosure. Without leaving the search page, i was impressed at the degree to which i could examine flight details. For example, my first result predicted a 1,092-mile journey from new york to miami. With many carriers you can pull up a seat map, in case you care to anticipate your level of claustrophobia. And, despite the boldface preliminary pricing, expedia allows users to review the full cost breakdown of a flight without leaving the page (see the slideshow).
The Vacation
With vacations—flights + hotels—expedia defaults to “expedia picks,” with options to sort by price, savings, ratings, hotel name, or city. If you’re looking for a specific hotel, you can add a hotel name. If you want a particular amenity, such as high speed internet or a swimming pool, you can add it as well. At the top of the screen you can pin hotels to a bing map, which, admittedly, looked a bit stale compared to google maps. Mouse over the price information button (i) and you retrieve a price quote, to the penny.
Unlike flights, vacations don’t hide the ball. Boldface prices include flight, hotel, taxes, and fees. One thing to watch closely: when booking for more than one traveler, expedia reveals prices per person. While this may seem a bit disingenuous, there are plenty of savings to be found by bundling services and buying for more than one person.
The Price Tag
When it comes to flight availability and pricing, expedia lands in the middle of the pack. A dispute with american airlines and american eagle airlines left customers without those search results, but, as of this month, the carriers have returned to the fold. Expedia also includes a best price guarantee, which, if you’re an eagle-eyed consumer, ensures you’ll get the best deal available. Here’s how it works: if you find a better deal for the same trip online within a day of booking, you can call an 800-number to earn the difference plus a $50 credit. While this is the same deal offered by travelocity as part of its broader customer bill of rights(opens in a new window), orbitz goes a step further in its low price guarantee(opens in a new window), adding automated fare updates to recent search results.
Ultimately, though, the results were surprisingly consistent in my experience. While i’m reticent to claim any sort of scientific authority in my testing—as anyone who travels knows, airfares fluctuate wildly—i did try and set up two basic controls in my testing: a domestic weekend trip, new york to miami, a month from my search date; and a second international week-long trip, new york to lisbon, scheduled six weeks ahead. For both flights, i avoided multiple carriers—who wants to miss a flight walking from one to the next?—and sought three types of airfares: 1) the least expensive overall; 2) the least expensive non-stop; and 3) the shortest possible flight.
As denoted in olive green, the best deals are shared by a number of sites, and often little separates the least and most expensive options. For miami, it’s a matter of a couple dollars; with lisbon, $14 separates expedia from the best-priced competitor (a three-way tie between travelocity, kayak, and orbitz), though there’s no difference non-stop. The five minutes that separates the durations is too little to squawk about.
As you might expect, the greatest source of variation lies in the international vacation. Sites land within about $50 of one another with miami; however, as much as $500 separates the least expensive bundles (kayak and orbitz) from the most expensive bundle (priceline) to lisbon. While expedia offers the most expensive recommended bundle, it falls in the middle of the least expensive packages. A final note on bundling: while i built my vacations around single occupancy, you can grow savings by booking for more than one passenger at a time. For example, searching for the least expensive lisbon vacation for two people returned between $100 and $400 in savings per person—$200 to $800 for a couple.
What you draw from these preliminary tests should not be a decisive winner and loser, but rather an aerial view of pricing, and a distant one at that. Each site excels at different with different variables. When it comes to airfare alone, you’re safe using any of the sites. If you’re building a vacation, i advise using more than one to scope out the best deal. And, naturally, booking for more than one traveler at a time only sweetens the deal.
1 Comment
we always booing through expedia