Check your options before take-off

Keen on booking an air ticket online? Whether it is going on vacation or travelling on work, instead of booking through an aggregator website such as makemytrip.com, cleartrip.com or yatra.com , it might sometimes be worth your while buying the ticket directly from the airline of your choice.

At other times, the situation could be the other way around. An examination of the rates on offer on aggregator websites vis-à-vis airlines’ booking systems throws up some surprises.

Maximising savings Say, you wanted to book an evening flight for January 19 between Delhi and Mumbai. There’s an Indigo flight that takes off at 6.45 pm and lands at 8.50 pm that catches your fancy. If you booked this flight directly through the airline, you’d have to pay ₹4,793 for your journey.

Instead, if you bought that ticket through

yatra.com or makemytrip.com , you’d actually end up paying ₹1,625 more, including all charges. But what if you decided that you’d rather fly in the morning? Well, the airline would sell you a ticket for a 7.30 am flight on the same day at ₹10,518, but this time, if you went via yatra.com , it would cost you ₹9,971. Makemytrip , on the other hand, wanted ₹10,572.

The discrepancy seems to be more pronounced in the case of some airlines vis-à-vis others. For example, a Jet Airways flight between Chennai and Kolkata booked four days before for a journey on January 19 costs exactly the same on the airline’s website, as well as the aggregators’.

This trend holds true even if you booked it, say, a month in advance. A similar trend exists for flights booked on GoAir one month in advance.

Comparison shopping

But such rules change with destinations and dates and thus do not necessarily apply all the time. The more practical thumb rule when booking flights is to do a thorough comparison shopping before fishing out your credit card.

Aggregators are usually able to offer better rates than airlines due to their business model of booking bulk space onboard aircraft at cheaper rates and then passing on that discount to customers. As a result, no particular comparison site is the best choice when it comes to finding the cheapest fare, either.

Another great way to make the most of aggregator sites is to determine the flights available on the day of your journey. This can give you some guideline as to what fares you can expect to pay on different airlines.

Then open the website of the airline to check whether you can get a ticket for a lower cost by booking directly. But as aggregator websites sometimes don’t include results for certain airlines, use multiple aggregators.

So what do you do in case there’s no difference in the fares quoted by an airline and an aggregator website? Make the booking directly through the airline. The rationale is that in case you cancel your ticket, the aggregator websites will levy a cancellation charge, usually around ₹250 on the booking.

This charge is over-and-above the penalty that will be levied by your airline.