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Metasearch flight test: Kayak, Travelsupermarket, Zugu, Skyscanner and Fly

When booking flights from the UK to Australia, which metasearch engines come up with the cheapest flight deals? Australiaflightbargains.com puts the five major players to the test.

• NOTE: This study has now been updated. Click here for analysis including Fly.com and Momondo.

New flight metasearch engine – Zugu

This week saw the launch of yet another new flights ‘metasearch’ engine – Zugu. For those unfamiliar with the term, a metasearch engine compares prices from numerous sources – including airlines, travel agents and other major booking engines (such as Opodo and Expedia).

Which metasearch engine to use?

As a general rule, these are the best places to start when it comes to looking for the best flight deals – they compare prices from many of the other sites you would visit anyway. But not all metasearch engines search the same sites, and not all produce the same prices. So which is best to use?

UK to Australia flight routes

With Zugu entering the market, I have decided to test out what I’d say it is fair to consider the big five – Kayak.co.uk, Travelsupermarket.com, Fly.co.uk, Skyscanner.net and now Zugu.co.uk. To test them, I have picked five UK to Australia flight routes, and picked five sets of flight dates at random.

All the dull number crunching can be found here, but the conclusions are as follows:

Which metasearch engine comes up with the best price?

For the five test flights, Travelsupermarket came out on top on its own on two occasions. Zugu managed to beat the other engines once, while on the other two occasions, Zugu and Travelsupermarket both came up with the same best deal. Skyscanner, Kayak and Fly didn’t find the best price on any of the five tests.

Which metasearch engine consistently gives the best deals?

This is a bit of a trite measurement, but if you award the 5 points for finding the best deal, 3 points for second best, 2 points for third best, 1 point for fourth best and 0 for worst, the results are as follows:

Travelsupermarket – 21,

Zugu -16

Kayak – 9

Skyscanner – 9

Fly – 5.

Which metasearch engine gives the best deals overall?

Another measurement of which metasearch engine gives the best deals is the total price of the five test flights. This time, it comes out as follows:

Zugu – £4,116.68

Travelsupermarket – £4278.66

Kayak – £4,635.31

Fly – £4773.70

Skyscanner – £4,776.13

A couple of interesting deviations from the points measure there – which would indicate that when Zugu is good, it’s very good and that when Skyscanner is bad, it’s very bad.

Disclaimers

Of course, a study like this requires a million and one caveats. First of all, it’s a very small sample – one that is nowhere near statistically significant.

Secondly, a result where the flight is no longer available on the actual booking site (such as Zugu’s result from Glasgow to Brisbane) will always throw the overall statistics a bit. But it is another factor – reliability of results – that affects how good the metasearch engine is.

To be fair to Zugu here, the site is still very much in the beta (trial) phase and this problem may be ironed out further down the line. That said, Zugu is run by Cheapflights – and the major issue I have found with Cheapflights is that advertised prices are often not available once you click through to the supplier.

Thirdly, these tests are only done on flights from the UK to Australia. Each metasearch engine has different strengths (I’m sure the people behind Skyscanner would concede that the engine’s strength is in European budget flights, for example). Just because Fly and Kayak are poor on Australia doesn’t mean they’re poor elsewhere in the world.

I’m also not comparing other factors, such as ease of use, quality of airline, length of layover and flexibility of dates. Zugu, for example, is weak on the latter, while Skyscanner is exceptionally good.

Conclusions

With all the caveats in mind, it is hard to conclusively say which metasearch engine is ‘best’ for finding flight deals. An awful lot depends on what you want to use it for. I, for example, am always very flexible on dates – other people aren’t. I also like to stop over somewhere new each time I go to Australia and am prepared to tolerate a more uncomfortable airline and longer flight to do so. Other people just want to get there as soon as possible and fly in as much comfort as they can.

But the results do show one thing – it’s always best to compare prices with at least two metasearch engines rather just relying on one favourite.

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