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| Above, a Korean Air Boeing 777 being readied for a flight to Japan at LAX. Photo by Armand Vaquer. |
As the years went on, I found that I wasn't getting the bargains I was used to and expected. It just so happened that I spotted an ad was in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Travel section for GatewayLAX. I decided to try them out to see what airfare bargains I can get.
As it turned out, GatewayLAX saved me hundreds of dollars on airfares, so I've been using them ever since. Korean Air has provided the lowest-priced airfares to Japan through GatewayLAX, I have found. I've flown Korean Air three times to Japan.
Arthur Frommer, one of the top gurus of travel, has an article on their website on using aggregators when searching for lower airfares.
He explained it this way:
The aggregators don't actually sell you the air tickets whose bargain price they've discovered; they simply relay that information to you and depend on the airline itself to actually sell you the ticket. Nevertheless, the airlines incur a small commission expense when an aggregator directs you to the airline's site, and therefore all the airlines are busily engaged in creating all sorts of advantages (priority boarding, increased frequent flyer mileage, advance seat reservations, reduced cancellation fees) designed to bring you directly to the airline's website without first consulting an aggregator.
The airlines are even more determined to avoid selling their tickets through one of the so-called Online Ticket Agencies (OTAs), whose names are Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity; they need to pay a heftier commission to Expedia et al., and therefore they're working hard to persuade the public not to go that route.
GatwayLAX is an aggregator, and the difference in airfare pricing is substantial.
Frommer recommends the following when searching for low airfares:
What's the lesson to heed from this dizzying array of sources? It is to go first to one of the aggregators, then to one of the OTAs, and finally to check what all of them are offering against the fares offered directly by the airline, by going to the airline's site.
He has one more recommendation, but I will let you go to his article to see what it is. If you are planning on traveling internationally or domestically, you should read his article first.
Read more: http://www.frommers.com/community/blogs/blog.cfm/arthur-frommer-online/its-foolish-disregard-aggregators-search-low-airfares#ixzz2Ip5j3a30
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