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Comment by mFixman | Hacker News Reader

A big part is fees. OTAs like Booking sell the base part of flight from Ryanair and low cost airlines at the same price as the airlines but with much higher fees for luggage and extras. They hide this second part from flight search engines, so they appear cheaper when including luggage.

I'm sure that a lot of dislike from low cost airlines comes from shitty OTAs rather than the airlines themselves.

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Boosting this.

I recently tried to use Expedia to book a flight from Vancouver to Toronto on Porter Airlines because then I could use my TD Reward points.

The default prices that showed up in the results looked the same on Expedia or directly on Porter, so it didn't seem like I was losing anything.

Except that base flight included no carry-on and no checked-baggage, which I needed to do. On Porter directly fixing that cost an extra $40. Expedia said it cost $60.

For this particular flight I also needed to be able to make changes after booking. On Porter that increased the cost by $100. On Expedia, $150.

I still did it, cuz, y'know - points. But I shook my fist at Expedia the entire time.

It can go both ways.

Pros of Expedia:

    - they have my card
    - their website does not suck as much as the airline’s
    - they let me cancel within 24/48 hours for free and immediately

The second point can be a huge selling point and it applies to a lot of OTAs. Every time I try to book direct “because it’s best” I easily spend triple the time and sometimes I get fleeced anyway (oh, here’s a $5 convenience fee for using a credit card we don’t like)

    > Every time I try to book direct “because it’s best” I easily spend triple the time

I have a similar experience. As a result, I have not booked a flight directly on the carrier's website in years. Do only suckers use the carrier's website now, because the prices and/or service are always worse? Sigh.

I still try to book direct because I (uh) enjoy opening 10 sites/apps at once and comparing the prices and getting the last dollar, but yeah if you value time more than money, booking direct is not a great idea.

Not that this would help now, but you might have been able to book through Expedia and then later add the luggage through the airline directly. Still can't use points on it but maybe you could have saved the points for another vacation some other time.

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