While the metasearches started as a simple and fast way to compare prices among all websites in one search, that is not always the case any more. The reason is that the biggest players Kayak, Skyscanner and Google Flights now have exclusivity deals with some major airlines.
They can argue some legal binding contracts with the OTAs stipulating undercuts are not allowed but at the end of the day it happens and for the user it just means they are not really comparing all the prices like they expect.
Regardless of the legal, commercial and strategic reasons this might happen, we actually only care about data and that is why we decided to analyze this metas and detect which airlines have an exclusivity deal with them. Here are the results.
Exclusivity on Kayak
- Delta
- United
- American
- Air France
- KLM
- Alaska
Exclusivity on Skyscanner
- Delta
- United
- American
- Air Canada
Exclusivity on Google Flights
- Delta
- United
- American
- Air France
- KLM
- British Airways
- Turkish
- Air Canada
- Alaska
- Iberia
Major airlines without any exclusivity:
- Lufthansa
- Southwest (not even showing its content on any meta)
- Ryanair
- Emirates
- Ethiopian
- Qatar Airways
- Easyjet
- Aeroflot
- LATAM
- Aeromexico
Final Thoughts
It’s interesting to note that the biggest airlines in the US are all exclusive and even one of them (Southwest) has also blocked their content. That means metas have no real value as aggregators and have become a hybrid OTA model, at least on some markets.
Another relevant factor is that from the 20 major airlines we analyzed, Google Flights has exclusivity with 10 of them. This raises the question whether Google model is really closer to a meta or to an OTA.
There are probably some smaller airlines we left out and also have deals. Have you found another one on your market? Feel free to comment and share!
