Particularly if they are in non-English speaking places? Or can these websites be adapted for the country/language?
I’m curious. I’m trying to explain searching for multiple carriers for a single destination to a friend, and it seems I’m having a hard time making him understand. Plus I would like to find a search engine he would find useful.
I use H.I.S which is a popular travel planning website in Japan.
(Be prepared for an explosion of colors and letters if you click that link)
It would be useful to know which country your friend is from too.
My Chinese acquaintances seem to use another site, but it was a wall of Chinese and I gave up trying to decipher it, and instead snag someone to do it for me in case I have to go to China.
zuji.com.au
bestflights.com.au
Brasil. I gave him the ones above, but was wondering if either those could be adapted, or he could find something similar that would be more accurate (and in Brazilian currency).
A lot of US travel websites require a US credit card to use. A friend from Ecuador would pay me in cash and use my credit card to buy tickets from Orbitz because they wouldn’t accept her card.
My experience using US-based sites is that their prices for tickets not involving the US aren’t that great. Last month when I was looking for a ticket Osaka-Seoul, I got a better price going to a Japanese travel agency (JTB).
amadeus.net (not .com!)
It’s from a company specialized in software for travel agencies. It’s available in 11 languages. Now, what it’s not very good at is taking into account the ultracheap companies; for that I prefer www.vuelosbaratos.com (it’s in Spanish), or if I’m traveling from Spain, Aena’s webpage (it’s the government agency that manages Spanish airports).
It sometimes has a delay on the prices, but I find SkyScanner is the most comprehensive here in Europe. A lot of people use Expedia as well. What I tend to do a lot is go to the Wikipedia page of whatever airport I’m flying to, because that tells you all the routes operating from the airport with which carrier. So you can find and look up all the direct routes yourself, and then use the flight aggregators to try and find indirect routes.
Travelpack and Opodo are major ones as well. I still find Skyscanner the most useful though.
I’m American, but fluent in Brazilian Portuguese with many Brazilian friends. I looked around a little and I think I found what he’s looking for.
(decolar means “takeoff” in Portuguese) appears to behave similarly to Kayak, Expedia, and the like. I put in some random dates and searched for a round-trip flight from Goiania to Belo Horizonte (two major cities in Brazil), and I could see the site searching all the popular Brazilian airline carriers. After a short time, it showed the least expensive flights, with prices in Reais (Brazilian currency).
A quick Googling also revealed some other sites that I haven’t tried:
www.voosbaratos.com.br (translation: cheap flights)
www.voesimples.com.br (translation: simply fly, or fly easily)
Also, if you go to Google and just type in “voos baratos” which means “cheap flights” in Portuguese, a number of results come up which may be of interest to your friend.
Thanks.
Just for clarification, I do know Portuguese. I just do not know what they’d use for the same service. And of course, my friend knew even less (since the last time he travelled abroad he was underage, someone else did the work for him).
I’ll send him those links, though, and see if he has heard of them/may know someone who uses them.
Perhaps momondo? It searches something like 700 travel websites for the best price on a given route. Has always worked for me.
http://www.makemytrip.com/ is most popular in India
A good ones in the UK are Skyscanner and Travel Supermarket.
There is a dutch version of expedia as well; I also use vliegwinkel.nl, worldticketcenter.nl, and cheaptickets.nl but there are probably many, many more. The rates are usually pretty similar, but never exactly…I never ubderstand the 3 euros difference between the prices.