skyscanner prices...too good to be true?

Hi Kaye,

I use the site, but I book directly with the airlines. A few times - - not many - - I have seen prices that are significantly lower than what the airlines offering, $100 or more. I resist the temptation for this reason. If there is any problem, the airline will tell you to deal with the vendor, Expedia, Travelocity, etc. The San Francisco Chronicle Sunday travel section usually has a feature column in which the writer solves some problem for a traveler. Many, many times the problem involves one of those on-line travel agencies, which seem to be unresponsive, even when they are clearly at fault. Am I remembering correctly that skyscanner shows you the vendor along with the prices? Easy, then, to just go to the airline site. By the way, $1200 sounds like a very good price to me.

The headline prices are available if all the planets and stars align, and maybe your need coincide with that, maybe not.

When you click through, after all the connections the figures should be achievable. Then when you click through to the actual airline what you see is what you get.

I've never had a bad experience using them that way.

Kaye,

If this is your frist trip abroad, then you dont have anything to gage/compare what you think you are getting to what you have got in the past if you had.

Also, if youre not sure about the price or if it sounds too good to be true, have you tried using a different search engine? Or have you tried going to the airlines web site and see what comes up there?

Also ALWAYS read the fine print.

I gage my cost this year to my previous costs. But i fly from PDX, not SFO to Amsterdam (AMS) and use that as my gage for my flights overthere.

happy trails.

Hi All,

I have been to Europe many times. The catch for Eastern Europe (or at least Croatia) is that no one flies there directly...even on the same airline. So I can get to big hubs, often then have to switch airports (say Heathrow to Gatwick) to get on smaller airlines (Croatia air, aer lingus, jet wings, etc) for two stops to Dubrovnik and it is usually CONSIDERABLY more than $1275 total. I will try searching each leg posted on skyscanner individually just to see. Still hoping to hear from more people who use/have used sky scanner in the past.

Thanks,
Kaye

I've never been able to take advantage of the "Best Rate", the ones I have found generally have connections times that exceed my tolerances. These are relatively expensive trips in time and money and missing one day of vacation because of a high risk connection just isn't worth it for me. Minimum threshold on all of my layovers is 1.5 hours.

Kaye -- I experienced the same thing recently on Skyscanner, looking at flights from Palermo to Rome. If you look carefully, they offer flights on major airlines, but often they are booked through agents with names like eDreams, Bravofly, tripsta.

These agents offered tickets on Alitalia for around $70, compared to over $200 for the same flight on the Alitalia website. So I did some research on Trip Advisor. Some people have no problems booking through these agents, but enough problems were reported to scare me away. So I agree with the advice you have been given, to book directly with an airline. I was able to book with Ryanair; timing wasn't ideal but the price was. Too bad they don't fly from the US.

Kaye

"Still hoping to hear from more people who use/have used sky scanner in the past."

to be blunt.

Skyscanner has been the ONLY search engine i have used in my 3+ years of travel and to buy my flights. So far.

Happy trails.

Skyscanner (like Kayak) does a meta-search, meaning that they pull fares from numerous other sites around the web. When you pick a fare you like, you are re-directed to the website selling the actual tickets. In other words, Skyscanner doesn't actually sell tickets.

Personally, I have used them many times and never had problems.

Emily makes the essential point that skyscanner provides a references to other sites and doesn't sell those tickets itself. That means that if problems arise, the customer deals with the seller, not skyscanner. It's very useful, especially for the European budget airlines that do not appear on the big trans-ocean agencies.

We use Skyscanner more often to find flights within Europe, but if it has identified a good trans-Atlantic option for you, then I see no reason not to follow their booking links to those airlines. Remember to allow generous connection time when booking separate tickets on different airlines; in case any leg is delayed, the airlines won't be working together. You also won't be able to check luggage all the way through to Dubrovnik.