BootsnAll Travel Community

So often here on Bootsnall, folk have commended websites that detail how best to fly from X to Y in Europe. I've often wondered just how great these sites really are, so decided earlier in the summer to test out a few.

You may think that AirNinja, WhichBudget, HareFares or SideStep give savvy guidance on how best to jet from Moscow to St Petersburg, Athens to Warsaw or Belfast to Dundee. But think again. We've “road-tested” seven different websites just to check out how sound they are when it comes to giving good advice on direct flights between fifteen city pairs in Europe. One service, which claims on its website to be “the most complete and current free route indexer for the continent” contrived to give a wrong or incomplete answer on all fifteen routes.

One of the seven online travel mediators (horrid phrase, I know, but that’s what these web sources are often called) was a star, and came up trumps on all fifteen routes. That was OAG (www.oag.com). OAG correctly pinpointed the eight airlines which have direct flights from Moscow to St Petersburg on our preferred travel dates, and was spot-on when it came to such obscure routes as Lisbon to Porto, Tirana to Athens and the little hop by plane across the English Channel from Brighton to Deauville. The OAG listings, I found, are ultra-reliable. But this is a fee-based service – perhaps worth the investment though to get quality information. Best of the free services which we tested was Alternative Airlines (www.alternativeairlines.com), which came in with a very creditable twelve out of fifteen routes correct. And Alternative Airlines is more than just a route indexer, but comes with a slick-looking online booking system too (though in truth I focused just on the route information functions rather than the booking engine).

So perhaps it's just worth bearing in mind that, particularly for travel in Europe (and especially so as you move furtrher east across the continent), the various websites that claim to offer definitive listings often give very partial and incomplete information.

I hope this will be of interest to Bootsnall members, and look forward to any comments on the topic. The full text of the article, with the underpinning data, can be seen online here, at least for the upcoming weeks.
Nicky Gardner
www.hiddeneurope.co.uk

skyscanner.com is a good tool for this too.