Comment by crystal_revenge

Disclaimer: I've worked for the OTA Hopper for 7+ years.

> Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline

This is not necessarily true. OTAs are not allowed to list a price that undercuts the airline but there are definitely ways for them to undercut the price that the booker ends up paying e.g. offering credits that they can redeem on future flight bookings. In this scenario the airline still gets paid the full amount for the ticket and the OTA makes up the difference.

Airlines are fully within their right to withhold inventory from OTAs that do this, but that entirely depends on the relationship that the OTA has with the airline. In some cases airlines actually run discount campaigns through OTAs in order to capture a bit more market share or fill inventory that they're not seeing being booked through their first party website.

>I can assure you any "add-ons" offered by a third party are ultimately a scam

This is definitely not true. Any kind of insurance product offered by third parties are essentially just that. Hopper's "cancel for any reason" insurance is essentially paying a premium to make your ticket fully refundable. Typically airline inventory managers price refundable tickets at a fixed premium and there's an opportunity there for OTAs to essentially undercut that premium because it's a naive model.

> Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline

Technically true in that they can't undercut the airline on the same fare class.

But there are many different fare classes and some of them are only offered via 3rd parties, so you can often get much better deals via e.g., Expedia than you can by going direct to the airline.

Just this year my family flew Melbourne-Madrid then Milan-Melbourne, both legs on Cathay, but this route was only available on Expedia (and maybe other OTAs too, I don't remember) - all I know was that it was impossible to even search for this route on Cathay's own website. We didn't have any issues, but if we did I don't know if I'd worry about Expedia's customer service being much worse than an airline's own service.

> Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline

How come I regularly see third-party OTAs offer the same itineraries cheaper than the airline then?

Sometimes there's a mystery fee added just before payment, but not nearly always – and I've flown such itineraries once or twice myself (if the difference was significant and I was absolutely certain I wouldn't need any change or extra service).

I was under the impression that these effectively share part of their agent fee with the traveler as a form of kickback (to appear as the cheapest option in search, which in the end might end up a win-win for both).

Airlines own systems are often awful UI and in case of some asian low costers your data is immediately sold to spammers (and they collect as much your data as they can too).

Depends on exact case but if traveling on a budget going with low costers and connections a good third party can be better than an unknown shitty airline's system.

I used Expedia a few years back, got a lower price and could cancel for full refund within a day but they probably don't do that anymore. Kiwi seemed okay. Ctrip now owned by China.

> I still have fond memories of their legendary (pre-leetcode) coding challenges [0] posted on the T

Those ITA puzzle ads on the T (Boston MBTA subway) got my interest. They were so much better for introvert thinkers, than getting ambushed in a Google interview context, and there was also no interference from a bad-loop interviewer.

> they also hosted the Boston Lisp users group in the early 2000s

IIRC, those meetings were organized by Faré Rideau. Volunteering meeting space was maybe ITA (then Google) and Northeastern University?

(I made the small contribution of building the the Boston Lisp announcements email list, by promising a lot of people, wary of social media, that it would be announcements-only. This included famous people, who I'd read about as a kid, such as in the Steven Levy book, or knew only from their names on books and standards documents.)

Incidentally, speaking of brilliant big names in programming... in a few weeks, Gregor Kiczales, Hal Abelson, and Gerald Sussman are speaking at RacketCon 2024. https://con.racket-lang.org/

> Having worked a bit in the travel industry, I highly recommend that you never book through a third party (by all means use their search). Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline and typically have abysmal customer service,

That’s not always true. I’ve often used services like Skyscanner to find a flight, then checked directly on the airline's website, and the prices didn’t match. Sometimes, it depends on which country you're in too. For example, I once looked at the same flight on Lufthansa’s German site and on a localized version for another country, and the price was different due to taxes. By a third part, I never had a different price depending on which country you are buying it.

However, nowadays, I still prefer to book directly through the airlines, though, because when they cancel your flight—and they’ve been doing that quite a lot since COVID—you have a better chance of holding them accountable.

> Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline

I've paid much less (on international round-trip flights originating USA) on justfly.com than I could find on the airline's own site.