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This is the site you need to look at for super cheap flights before you book your next trip by David Slotnick on Jan 9, 2018, 4:04 PM The Insider Picks team writes about stuff we think you'll like. Business Insider has affiliate partnerships, so we get a share of the revenue from your purchase. 
If you follow Insider Picks and read our flight deals, you may have noticed that I keep describing a website called Momondo as "my go-to site for flight discounts." Momondo is a "metasearch engine," which performs searches on a ton of other websites. Basically what a metasearch engine does is search other websites and compare results from each. It's as if you visited dozens or hundreds of different websites yourself and searched each one for the same thing, except much, much easier. Specifically, Momondo searches airline websites and just about every travel booking site and "online travel agency" (OTA) that exists. According to Momondo, it compares "billions" of flights, searching across more than 30 international markets. Importantly, it searches tons of different OTAs, including big ones like Priceline, but also much smaller ones like "CheapBestFares," "GoToGate," "Fareboom," and "Flightsbird" — sites that you probably haven't heard of. Often, these smaller and newer websites offer lower prices than the major online travel agencies (OTAs), like Priceline. This can be for any of a few reasons, according to the cheap flight e-mail subscription service Scott's Cheap Flights. The smaller OTAs may be based in other countries where they have much lower operating costs. Sometimes, they'll offer discounts, even at a small loss, to try and gain market share or brand recognition. In some cases, they also may charge fees— on top of what the airlines charge — if you cancel or change your ticket. However, chances are you wouldn't be canceling or changing anyway; most discounted tickets typically incur change fees from the airlines that equal or rival the cost of the actual ticket, so chances are you wouldn’t be willing to pay the airline fees, and would therefore never encounter the OTA’s fees. The smaller OTAs which Momondo searches are fantastic for booking tickets at great prices and fairly simple itineraries — in other words, they're great for round-trip flights between the US and other countries or continents. As Scott's Cheap Flights points out, some of the smaller OTAs have poor reviews online, but those are generally biased (since with services like that, the only people writing reviews are those who had a negative issue), and often result because someone didn't read the terms and conditions and were surprised by change fees. When booking with any OTA, you should wait a few days between booking your flight and making other plans. One last thing to keep in mind when booking through any OTA — even the big ones — is the extremely unlikely possibility that a fare will be gone by the time you make your purchase. This unusual occurrence is caused by the complicated ways that airlines price their tickets, so here's a simplified explanation: Say an airline has 100 coach seats on a flight. Even though they're the same seat for the same flight, they won't be priced the same. That's because the airline divides the seats into "fare buckets." For this example, let's say there are buckets of seats that are $300, $400, and $500. The airline might put a quarter of the seats into the $300 bucket, a quarter of them into the $400 fare bucket, and the rest in the expensive bucket. Whenever you book travel through a third-party site (or even a traditional travel agent), it runs a search for tickets, in most cases looking for the cheapest fare bucket that still has seats available. The prices you find are the result of that search. However, when you make a reservation through an OTA, there's a slight delay before the airline actually issues your ticket. That's because the travel site has to go back to the airline to actually purchase that ticket on your behalf. However, let's go back to the fare buckets. Say that when the OTA shows you the search results, there was only one ticket left in the cheapest fare bucket, and between when you paid the OTA and when it contacts the airline, the airline sells that last ticket on its own. That means that the lowest-priced ticket is no longer available, so the OTA has to come back to you to see what you'd rather do: buy the next-cheapest ticket, or get a refund. I would stress that the vast majority of the time, this won't happen. It just means that, as a best practice, whenever you purchase tickets through an OTA or travel booking site, you should wait a few days, or until you get ticket confirmation, before making any additional nonrefundable plans for your trip. It can take anywhere from a minute to a few days to get the ticket confirmation. In my experience, Momondo almost always offers the best price for a flight. In a lot of different tests — I used to write guides for booking travel online — I found that Momondo almost always does the best job finding the best available price from any OTA. It finds better deals than any other metasearch website, including Google Flights or Kayak, partly because it has access to so many different OTAs. Take a look below at how to book tickets through Momodo. SEE ALSO: This is one of the most recommended rewards credit cards — here's why First, visit Momondo's home page.  When you visit Momondo, just enter your origin and destination cities, dates, number of passengers, and hit "Search." As an example, let's take a look at this recent flight deal from New York to Rome. Typically, you don't have to worry about selecting any of the "Compare with" boxes underneath the search fields — Momondo finds the best price anyway.
Click the "Cheapest" tab for the best price.  Look to see which website or OTA offers the best price, then click it to be taken to the booking page. In this case, Norwegian Air Shuttle offers the cheapest flight, and the best price is available by clicking and booking through Norwegian's own website, instead of an OTA.
In this different search, an online travel agency (OTA) called Hop2 has the best price.  In this case, a smaller OTA offers the best price for the flight by more than $30. Click on it to go to the booking screen.
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