First time World Routes attendee, Momondo has been recognised by respected travel advice provider Frommer’s as being the world’s leading price comparison site for flights. The Danish company was selected ahead of a number of respected platforms as offering the best place to find the cheapest airfares across 28 search scenarios.
There are a number of ways to find the best rates for airfares: OTAs (Online Travel Agencies) through which you can book directly; aggregators, or meta-search engines, which troll the databases of dozens of OTAs, booking engines, and airlines to return the best results; and the airlines’ own websites.
Sometimes an OTA will turn up a rate the aggregators don’t at first show (and vice-versa). Additionally, while a visit to an airline’s own site, can educate you of sales discounts or other announcements you wouldn’t necessarily know about from other sources.
As part of its analysis Frommer’s put the top and most famous OTAs and aggregators through a range of flight searches to determine who found the lowest prices overall as well as— where possible —the lowest fares on a direct flight. It tested each on last-minute flights (leaving within 72 hours) and advance purchase fares (booked six weeks out).
The search criteria covered major gateways (New York to Los Angeles, Miami to Rio de Janeiro) and secondary ones (Philadelphia to Rome). It even included a few alternative city pairs (Denver to New Delhi) and a flight outside of the North American market (London to Barcelona) to see how they performed in a market dominated by low-cost air carriers.
In its finding’s Frommer’s said: “Momondo remains, hands-down, the best place to find the cheapest airfares every single time.” In its 28 search scenarios, this aggregator found the lowest price 14 times, and the second-lowest eight times—and it was never off the lead price by more than a few dollars, according to Frommer’s.
A complicated, weighted scoring system ranked Momondo with 36 points, a long way ahead of second ranked Skyscanner with nine points and third-placed Google Flights with just three points.
Frommer’s said Momondo provides “shortcuts to cheapest, quickest, and best overall results”, while it was praised for a “nifty fare calendar graph” which shows average prices for a wide range (one week before and two weeks after each flight), so the search quickly shows if another date might cost much less. It was also praised by Frommer’s for not tracking cookies; including Amtrak and Eurostar trains; a filter by airport (including "nearby airports" in neighbouring cities).
Momondo is approaching its tenth anniversary having been established in 2006 by a small group of skilled and dedicated Danish developers united around a mission: to open the world. Challenging the dogmas of the flight industry, they created the platform: a free, independent online flight search offering full price transparency across the market.
The ambition was and still is to create a global brand – not merely a functionality like most competitors, but a bold and colourful travel universe to unite users, inspiring to meet the world eye to eye.
Speaking to Routesonline in Durban ahead of the opening of World Routes, Bibi Lægaard, head of meta sales at momondo Group outlined the vision of the platform: “Inspirational travel search is not just a matter of data, it is bringing data to life. Giving them a voice, a tune, a colour and an expression - transforming them into insights that open our eyes to new possibilities and paths of adventures.”
Momondo Group is an online travel media and technology company that is driven by the belief that an open world is a better world. The Group has a portfolio of three core brands, Cheapflights, momondo and Skygate, and operates dedicated sites in over 30 countries and territories around the world, in more than 20 languages.
It recently announced it had secured a £10 million working capital line of credit from Silicon Valley Bank, the bank of the world’s most innovative businesses and their investors. Momondo Plans to use this facility to provide additional liquidity as the business pursues its ongoing growth strategy through global expansion and product development.
US-based Frommer's is a travel guidebook series founded by Arthur Frommer in 1957, who as a young corporal in the US Army, wrote a travel guide for American GIs in Europe, latter producing a civilian edition called ‘Europe on $5 a Day’. The book ranked popular landmarks and sights in order of importance and included suggestions on how to travel around Europe on a budget.
The book is recognised as the first travel guide to show Americans that they could afford to travel in Europe and subsequently Frommer's has expanded to include more than 350 guidebooks across 14 series, as well as other media.
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