Save Money by Searching on Several Travel Portals

In this post, I walk through the importance of searching on several travel portals to save money on flights.

This series of posts is about my experiences of helping clients save money when paying cash for their tickets.

Other posts about saving money include:

• Save Money by Purchasing Two One-Way Ticket
• Save Money with Air Canada Same Day Change
• Save Money by Searching on Several Travel Portals
• Save Money by Checking Air Canada US Dollar and Air Canada Canadian Dollar Website
• Save Money by Checking WestJet US Dollar and WestJet Canadian Dollar Website
• Save Money by Buying Porter Airlines Gift Cards from Costco

I have always believed that flight pricing is relatively constant across all travel portals. Historically, I would use Google Flights as a foundation for my searches. Recently, I came across a situation, where Google Flights did not initially show me the cheapest flight option.

Google Flights Issue?

I never imagined I would write an article questioning the reliability of Google Flights. But here I am, with an alarming price difference, that I would have completely missed had I not been using a range of flight search options, for a client of mine.

The request was quite simple, they needed to fly to India, during Christmas and New Year, except, they planned their trip, at the last moment. They wanted to fly out in the next couple of days with a return after New Year.

During my comprehensive search, I also explored looking at two one-way options rather than a return ticket.

I pulled up a search for Delhi to Toronto, one way in January and was alarmed at the pricing. The last option, which was a one way flight with a reasonable connection on United was C$3,442. Quite unaffordable.

When I clicked through, the price dropped by nearly 50%, to C$1,745.

I only discovered this price discrepancy because I had a 20% off coupon I could use, and I wanted to check the price on Air Canada. With the 20% off coupon, the price actually dropped to $1,450.

What about other travel portals?

Skyscanner showed me that flight option.

Cheapoair did not.

Conclusion

This is a friendly warning, there might be weird scenario where Google Flights are not providing the latest price on their search results.

If flight pricing is expensive, you should always consider searching on several travel portals and airline websites directly to identify the lowest price ticket option.