Sorta, the real pain point is if anything needs changing on any of your tickets, it's a total PITA. I value 'less hassle' more than I do saving 5-20% of the airfare. For me Kiwi (and other middlemen like it) are a hard 'No'.
If things go wrong with Kiwi, they're likely to go very wrong, yes...but on the other hand, if I can keep saving $700 per trip, I can afford for them to go very wrong sometimes and still come out ahead.
No reasonable amount of savings is enough to convince us to ever use a third party portal.
My wife and I travel a lot as a hobby - mostly domestically with one or two international trips a year - and something is statistically going to change between the time we book and the time we fly on at least one of our trips.
It’s a lot easier to make changes directly with the airline/hotel especially when you have status than going through a portal
Just last month we had a flight to Vegas + hotel over Labor Day that we changed at the last minute to go see my mother in law who had been taken to the hospital by our older (adult) son. We were able to change our flights to another city (ATL instead of LAS) as an even swap.
This was Delta airlines.
Then two hours later we found out she had Covid and decided against it and were able to call and change our flight back all without any change in fees and get our hotel reservation back.
Good luck doing that when booking through a portal.
May not be everyone’s experience, and if you live in a big hub city for one of the others they might be better. But for me, I only book something else if it will save me a plane change.
We knew about the non assigned seats. But flying Southwest without assigned seats is like a reenactment of Peloponnesian War (“We are Sparta!!”). We said we would do a layover before flying SW again.
My wife chose to fly Spirit back to LAS when she went to a conference over flying SW and that’s saying a lot.
I don’t have an issue with SW. The seat thing never bugged me too badly.
But no first class. And if I can’t afford business/first, I can’t afford the trip these days. I would rather stay home.
Unfortunately, Amex’s hotel partners - Hilton and Marriott are usually horrible redemptions.
Chase -> Hyatt is the gold standard. But Hyatt has a small footprint