Online travel agent flight deals: why the price is almost always too good to be true

New Which? research reveals booking a flight through some online travel agents (OTAs) can be more than £100 more expensive than booking direct with airlines, if you add in the cost of luggage and seats.  

OTAs often advertise cheap upfront prices for the flight itself. For instance, when searching for a cheap flight to Orlando, eDreams came out cheapest, quoting £556 for a return flight from London Gatwick with British Airways. To book directly with BA, you’d pay £558, £2 more. However, once we added in hold luggage and a seat, the price through eDreams shot up to £814. BA quoted £712 for the same flight with the same extras – £102 less.

This was just one example of an OTA adding significant mark-ups on luggage and seat selection. We carried out 28 price spot checks, checking four different routes flying with four different airlines – BA, EasyJet, Jet2 and Ryanair. We compared them with prices from Gotogate, Kiwi, Opodo and TravelUp, and it was cheaper to book with the airline every time, once we included the add-ons.

The majority of people don’t know that they’re being ripped off, either. A Which? survey in October 2022 found that 60% of those who’d used an OTA to book a flight within the past two years didn’t realise they could inflate luggage prices. 

London Stansted to Athens

London Gatwick to Orlando

Table notes:  Flight prices were collected on the same day. Flights are for 11-18 March 2023. Prices were for return flights and rounded to the nearest pound. For standard seat selection, we chose the cheapest seat we could find on the airline site and matched it accordingly. We didn’t include hand luggage costs on the BA flight because it was already included 

Ryanair vs OTAs

In a short-haul price comparison flying to Athens, Opodo offered the cheapest fare, which was £3 cheaper than booking direct with Ryanair. But when you add a cabin bag (£30 with Ryanair), Opodo is £6 more expensive. Once you add a 20kg hold bag, plus a standard seat on board, Opodo goes up by another £121 - compared with Ryanair’s £58. 

Ryanair has been a vocal critic of OTAs. As a low cost carrier, its business model relies on selling extras to boost profits, so it benefits from selling its flights direct to customers. It  doesn’t permit any website to sell its flights without commercial agreements in place and says those that do are in breach of the terms of use of its website.

The airline has taken OTAs to court over the issue. Last year, the Paris Court of Appeal supported Ryanair’s stance, upholding an earlier judgment by the Paris Commercial Court. It told the French arm of Lastminute.com to stop selling Ryanair flights in France. 

But the  airline hasn’t always won. Other courts have ruled in favour of OTAs, often on the basis that removing the right of third parties to sell flights would be anti-competitive. 

In 2021, Ryanair took the issue further, telling passengers with boarding passes issued by Kiwi they wouldn’t be allowed to fly. Ryanair claimed that to ‘comply with public health, security and safety regulations’, passengers should check themselves in personally rather than via an agent. 

It’s a position Kiwi doesn’t agree with. It told us it provides ‘the same or even more information about health, security and safety regulations’. It added: ‘We believe that Ryanair is only trying to discourage passengers from booking via Kiwi.com.’

Poor service through some Online Travel Agents

Frosty relationships between OTAs and airlines aren't good for customers, who often find themselves being passed back and forth between the two when things go wrong with flight bookings.

Even the best rated companies from our recent flight booking sites survey, Expedia and Booking.com, only gained three out of five for customer service. Lastminute.com gained just two stars. Opodo, meanwhile, finished bottom of our flight booking site table, with the lowest customer satisfaction score.

One Which? member said communication with Opodo was ‘impossible’. In response, Opodo told us: ‘We have reduced call waiting times by 65% since the pandemic and the average time taken for answering calls now stands at just 95 seconds.’ 

Another member dubbed Lastminute.com ‘the worst company they’d ever dealt with by far’ and ‘almost impossible to reach’. 

Lastminute told Which?: ‘We have strong relationships with our partners, working closely for 25 years, putting customers at the heart of everything we do.’

A common theme is terrible service, something Zoe Sharp, a TravelUp customer, experienced.

Zoe booked a JetBlue flight through the OTA for her family from London to New York in December 2022. When they could no longer travel, she contacted TravelUp to cancel.

Despite JetBlue’s terms and conditions permitting Zoe to gain a credit refund when cancelling 24 hours or more in advance of departure, TravelUp said this wasn’t possible. Knowing her rights, Zoe insisted TravelUp cancel anyway. However, by the time it did, the departure time was less than 24 hours away. This left Zoe in limbo.

Zoe had even paid an extra £75 upfront for TravelUp’s ‘gold service pack’. This was supposedly for ‘preferential customer service’. And yet, it was only after Which? stepped in that TravelUp said she was entitled to credit – not brilliant for a website that advertises its services as ‘0% faff’.

Online travel agent refund hold-ups

Zoe isn’t alone in experiencing this sort of hassle. Which? regularly hears from customers of some OTAs struggling to get refunds for disrupted or cancelled flights. 

Part of the problem is that OTAs often use their own credit cards to book flights, rather than the customer’s. That means that when a flight is cancelled, the OTA must apply for the refund. It then has to be credited back to its card before it can be passed on to the customer, which lengthens the process.

While using an OTA shouldn’t affect your consumer rights, all too often it ends up causing delay, confusion and frustration.

How to book your next flight or holiday

In their responses to us, many of the OTAs argued that they allow passengers to look at flights from different airlines at the same time – and to add hotel bookings or other services. In fact, Skyscanner or similar sites are the best place to see all the possible flight options, and if you want to add a hotel or other services, many airlines let you do that too, but we wouldn’t use them or an OTA.

You’re better off booking with a decent package holiday provider, such as one of our Which? Recommended Providers. Occasionally, OTAs do offer an unbeatable deal, but you should weigh up whether the difference in price is worth it. If it’s minimal, we’d choose the airline every time, because if anything goes wrong later down the line, you know who the responsibility lies with.