Comment by nomilk 10 months ago
> Kiwi.com does this now.
Sorta, the real pain point is if anything needs changing on any of your tickets, it's a total PITA. I value 'less hassle' more than I do saving 5-20% of the airfare. For me Kiwi (and other middlemen like it) are a hard 'No'.
This is true when going through any third party portal for either flights or hotels.
No reasonable amount of savings is enough to convince us to ever use a third party portal.
My wife and I travel a lot as a hobby - mostly domestically with one or two international trips a year - and something is statistically going to change between the time we book and the time we fly on at least one of our trips.
It’s a lot easier to make changes directly with the airline/hotel especially when you have status than going through a portal
Just last month we had a flight to Vegas + hotel over Labor Day that we changed at the last minute to go see my mother in law who had been taken to the hospital by our older (adult) son. We were able to change our flights to another city (ATL instead of LAS) as an even swap.
This was Delta airlines.
Then two hours later we found out she had Covid and decided against it and were able to call and change our flight back all without any change in fees and get our hotel reservation back.
Good luck doing that when booking through a portal.
Delta is not perfect, but compared to United and American it’s practically Singapore/Emirates vs Spirit/Ryanair. The whole experience is better in every way.
May not be everyone’s experience, and if you live in a big hub city for one of the others they might be better. But for me, I only book something else if it will save me a plane change.
We flew Southwest last month from MCO - LAS (we’ve been twice this year) because we wanted to try it and SW has more non stop flights than Delta from MCO.
We knew about the non assigned seats. But flying Southwest without assigned seats is like a reenactment of Peloponnesian War (“We are Sparta!!”). We said we would do a layover before flying SW again.
My wife chose to fly Spirit back to LAS when she went to a conference over flying SW and that’s saying a lot.
And those are two of the worst flying cities in the US. MCO, piles of families that have never flown before doing a once-in-a-lifetime trip. LAS, drunks who don’t know how to keep a lid on it.
I don’t have an issue with SW. The seat thing never bugged me too badly.
But no first class. And if I can’t afford business/first, I can’t afford the trip these days. I would rather stay home.
It's even worse when using points. Amex now uses Expedia on the back end for hotel booking. I made a res for a hotel in Italy and I tried to change it. Amex says call Expedia. Expedia says call the hotel. The hotel says call Expedia. Soooo frustrating. I think Amex travel is going to poop, and that used to be their thing.
At least with Amex you can transfer to airlines and you will almost always get more than 1 cents per point by transferring to an airline.
Unfortunately, Amex’s hotel partners - Hilton and Marriott are usually horrible redemptions.
Chase -> Hyatt is the gold standard. But Hyatt has a small footprint
Same reason that while I may use Kayak/others for searching, I almost always book the ticket directly with the airline unless it's such a huge savings that it's worth to go through a third party and deal with multiple airlines. Many airlines will price-match these days so if do find the same flight cheaper through a third-party they'll give it to you at that price (providing all legs were with their airline of course).
The savings can be a lot more than 20% - last month I had a roundtrip ticket of $2000 brought down to $1300 (and got there faster!) via the switching airlines approach. It did come with some additional stress - needed additional visas and was worried about missing flights.
If things go wrong with Kiwi, they're likely to go very wrong, yes...but on the other hand, if I can keep saving $700 per trip, I can afford for them to go very wrong sometimes and still come out ahead.