Fun fact: Booking flights through a travel agent (Online Travel Agency – OTA) when you should indeed book through an airline can result in lost money, wasted time, and frustrations that ruin a trip.

Here’s why you should almost always book your flight through an airline. 

While travel agencies may offer savings, direct bookings with airlines provide transparency, efficient processes, and superior support. For critical or flexible plans and unexpected changes, airlines provide a more reliable and seamless experience.

Let’s explore the key differences between airlines and OTAs (such as Expedia, Trip.com, Agoda, Booking.com and more), before shedding light on when it is acceptable to book through an OTA. 

Side note: I have utilized OTAs numerous times to book my flights – and I am still using them without issues – but only under certain conditions.

Changes/Cancellations: Direct Path With Airlines

Sometimes, the unexpected happens after we book a flight, and we may have to change or cancel a booking. Travelers must factor in the possibility of changes or cancellations on every trip.

When it comes to changes or cancellations, using an OTA introduces an additional layer of complexity.

What happens is that the communication chain becomes more convoluted when an OTA is involved. Requests for changes or cancellations must go through the OTA before reaching the airline, since OTAs act as intermediaries in the booking process, aka the middleman. The increased back-and-forth processes lead to a higher likelihood of delays and misunderstandings. 

Moreover, OTAs/ intermediaries may impose higher fees for changes or cancellations compared to booking directly with the airline.

Understand that OTAs typically earn their revenue through commissions and markups on the flights they sell. To keep flight prices competitive and compensate for their profit-making needs, they often impose MUCH higher ‘hidden’ fees for things like changes or cancellations to bookings. This helps to protect their profit margins.

Hence, making changes to a flight booked via a travel agent is a recipe for incurring higher fees, complications (in terms of the change process), and lost time. This is a common problem that many travelers encounter when they unfortunately have to alter their flight itinerary.

Refunds: Assurance With Airlines

There are scenarios where refunds are warranted. Perhaps your flight was unfairly cancelled by the airline, or there were significant alterations to the flight schedule that caused you to miss your flight. In these scenarios, the refund process varies from airlines to travel agents. 

Reputable airlines usually offer relatively straightforward refund processes. There are procedures to follow, but dealing directly with the airline provides a more direct line to obtaining a refund.

When a flight was booked through an OTA, obtaining a refund can be more challenging:

• Intermediary Involvement: Like changes or cancellations, processing refunds is just as challenging through an intermediary (middleman). The indirect communication chain can lead to misunderstandings, longer response times, and increased chances of errors.
• Bureaucratic Processes: Since OTAs serve as the middleman, you need to go through the OTA’s additional layers of bureaucracy in their refund processes, beyond the airlines’. That’s double the trouble. The refund request will go through many more channels involving procedures, checks, and approvals.

Simply put, it may be difficult to get (all) your money back. At best, you may get your refund but the whole process would take longer, and you may be required to go through time-consuming back-and-forth processes.

Customer Service: OTAs Cannot Match Airlines’ Standards

There have been widespread complaints online that travel agents do often provide subpar customer service. Indeed, OTAs’ weaknesses tend to lie in customer support.

Here’s why:

• Generalized Support: OTAs often provide generalized customer support to cater to a wide range of travel-related inquiries beyond just flights, such as hotels, car rentals, and vacation packages. This can result in less specialized and personalized support for flight-related issues, compared to airlines that focus solely on air travel.

• Limited Access to Airline Systems: While OTAs facilitate bookings, they may not be able to provide detailed information about specific airline policies, flight changes, or other airline-related matters.

• Volume of Inquiries: Since OTAs do not just handle flights but other travel-related logistics, they typically handle a large volume of bookings from various customers. The sheer volume can strain their customer service resources, making it challenging to respond promptly and efficiently to every query.

• Profit Margins and Cost-Cutting: To remain competitive, some OTAs may focus on cost-cutting measures, including limiting customer service resources.

In contrast, booking directly with an airline often ensures better customer service. It’s no surprise that airlines have dedicated support teams for flight inquiries. They can provide more personalized assistance for specific queries – and even do so in a timely and efficient manner.

This article was originally published on unboundist.com. If it is now published on any other site, it was done without permission from the copyright owner.

Clear Verdict (And When to Use an OTA)

You may be wondering: What if you never need to make changes to your flights or obtain any refunds? Is there a hard and fast rule to avoid booking flights with OTAs?

Let’s discuss the elephant in the room: flight prices. It is the main factor that travelers consider when purchasing flights.

After all, you may often encounter cheap deals on OTAs that tempt you to make a purchase before the ‘lowest’ price jacks back up again.

In reality, both airlines and OTAs may have flight discounts and exclusive deals. At times, ticket prices on airlines’ websites are slightly cheaper than OTAs, and vice versa. 

I have found that there’s no clear winner, though airlines may provide more price transparency (in terms of breaking down the fees and taxes involved).

The allure is that OTAs offer the convenience of a one-stop shop that consolidates your flights, accommodation, and activities. In other words, you may find all your bookings in one app, consolidated on one platform. This is very convenient. Many travelers, especially less experienced ones, prefer this because they do not need to manage their bookings across multiple apps by different airlines and hotels. Staying organized is an important skill when it comes to travel logistics, but OTAs can make such logistics much easier.

Such convenience, coupled with the fact that OTAs offer discounted prices that are sometimes cheaper than the airlines, means that travelers will sometimes prefer booking via the OTA. At times, I do exactly that.

Here’s the verdict: Booking flights via OTAs may be fine for less important trips where you get to save money (due to discounted/cheaper prices) or when you are sure that you do not require any changes, cancellations, or customer service. Otherwise, it’s best to book your flight via a reputable airline.

And here’s what you should do: Utilize a flight search engine like Google Flights to search for flights (not an OTA): 

• Use Google Flights to search for flights, view prices, and compare options from various airlines. 
• When you find a flight you want on Google Flights, you’ll be redirected to either the airline’s website or to an online travel agency (OTA) to complete your booking. 
• You may consider either option, but in most cases, you should book directly through the airline.

Alternatively, you can use an OTA to search for flights instead of Google Flights, but know that OTAs do not redirect you to the airline’s website. If you wish, you should complete your booking independently by navigating to the airline’s website yourself to find the specific flight(s).

Summary

To reiterate, dealing with OTAs is often more troublesome or costly, generally speaking, for making flight changes and obtaining refunds.

Always factor in contingencies and unexpected events when planning your trips. Only use an OTA when you can afford the risk.