Due to the lower levels of demand in the air industry the competition for ticket sales has become toughest than ever. Pricing factors along with flexibility policies are the key drivers in this scenario, since it’s clear that no customer will buy anything except when they feel they are getting a great deal out of the uncertain situation.
Under these circumstances the ideal players to answer for this majority of the market are metasearches, where users can compare among several different travel agencies and airlines in just one search and see both the best prices and the different flexible policies each brand offers.
The question arises then of who right now is showing the best prices on several markets.
Routes
We will be analyzing the US and Europe markets, where on each we will select the following popular routes to run on our test.
- Los Angeles (LAX) to New York City (NYC)
- Atlanta (ATL) to Orlando (MCO)
- New York City (NYC) to Orlando (ORD)
- New York City (NYC) to London (LON)
- Los Angeles (LAX) to Mexico City (MEX)
- New York City (NYC) to Toronto (YYZ)
- Paris (PAR) — New York City (NYC
- London (LON) to Dubai (DXB)
- Madrid (MAD) to Paris (PAR)
- Rome (FCO) to Barcelona (BCN)
Sample
For each one of the routes we run a search on Kayak, Skyscanner and Google Flights for one hundred different date combinations and calculate the percentages for each winning metasearch.
Results
Following are the numbers for each route.
Los Angeles (LAX) to New York City (NYC)
- Kayak 21%
- Skyscanner 18%
- Google Flights 9%
Atlanta (ATL) to Orlando (MCO)
- Kayak 20%
- Skyscanner 68%
- Google Flights 0%
New York City (NYC) to Orlando (ORD)
- Kayak 0%
- Skyscanner 0%
- Google Flights 53%
New York City (NYC) to London (LON)
- Kayak 58%
- Skyscanner 21%
- Google Flights17%
Los Angeles (LAX) to Mexico City (MEX)
- Kayak 10%
- Skyscanner 32%
- Google Flights 55%
New York City (NYC) to Toronto (YYZ)
- Kayak 2%
- Skyscanner 97%
- Google Flights 0%
Paris (PAR) — New York City (NYC)
- Kayak 89%
- Skyscanner 11%
- Google Flights 0%
London (LON) to Dubai (DXB)
- Kayak 82%
- Skyscanner 0%
- Google Flights 9%
Madrid (MAD) to Paris (PAR)
- Kayak 62%
- Skyscanner 0%
- Google Flights 0%
Rome (FCO) to Barcelona (BCN)
- Kayak 71%
- Skyscanner 15%
- Google Flights 0%
The percentages there don’t always add up to one hundred because some searches were tied either between two or all of the metas.
Analysis
It’s clear that the results are very biased depending on the route and market, but what if we aggregate all data to select an overall winner?
Kayak has won 41% of the total searches, Skyscanner 26%, Google Flights 28% and 5% were ties. The clear winner is Kayak.
We could also calculate the price differences to see by how much it is actually cheaper. On this metric Kayak is 1.9% cheaper than Skyscanner and 4.1% cheaper than Google Flights.
Which metasearch is the cheapest in your market?
