Comment by throwaway290
Comment by throwaway290 2 months ago
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'd be very careful with Kiwi. They don't have official OTA agreements with all the airlines they resell; at least Ryanair at one point was actively hostile towards them, and Kiwi was working with personal Ryanair accounts to get around their roadblocks. This in turn meant I couldn't access Ryanair's mobile boarding passes and had to find a printer on short notice at the airport.
While airlines can apparently not legally completely prevent such "uncooperative" third-party resellers, and I do have some sympathy for the business model, it's not great to be stuck between travel agent and airline when things go wrong.
Other OTAs like Experian actually take the role of a good old travel agent (the entity historically doing much of the ticketing work the airlines are now doing directly) and will usually only sell you itineraries of interlining (i.e. cooperating) airlines, and also only of airlines that accept travel agents as business partners in the first place.