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source_url: "https://www.cheapestdestinationsblog.com/2025/12/28/travel-aggregators/"
title: Online Travel Aggregators Save You Time and Money
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> **Original source:** https://www.cheapestdestinationsblog.com/2025/12/28/travel-aggregators/

While few aspects of travel planning are 100% effective all the time, you can almost always save time and money in your searches by using one of the online travel aggregators. This way you can search the best prices from multiple companies without visiting 10 or 20 different travel websites.

![different hotel prices with travel aggregators ](https://www.cheapestdestinationsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/shota-room.jpg)

_This room goes for $60, $70, $83, or $121_

The word “aggregator” sounds like an annoyed Florida reptile and it’ll sometimes get flagged by spell check programs. It is a real word though, in the Oxford Dictionary with two definitions.

1) a website or program that collects related items of content and displays them or links to them. OR 1) a wholesale buyer or broker of a utility service, such as electricity or long-distance telephone service, who packages it and sells it to consumers.

In the case of these travel sites, it’s a little of both. You’ve probably used one of them already, maybe without even realizing it, because some, like Hotwire and Kayak, have been around almost as long as we have been booking travel on the internet. Plus whether you like it or not, you’re going to be hit up with Google’s own version every time you do a travel search there.

## Car Rental Searches With an Aggregator

![online travel aggregators are useful for car rental deals](https://www.cheapestdestinationsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/car-rental-discover.jpg)

Where can you find the most savings by using a site that compares multiple agencies at once? In my experience, the car rental searches present the best payoff. For whatever reason, rental car prices are wildly inconsistent between OTAs like Expedia and the company websites themselves. I’ve frequently saved $100 or more on the same car class just by finding the lowest-priced option instead of the first place I looked.

There used to be a whole bunch of these websites to choose from, but many of them got swallowed up by the big three providers that pretend to give you more of a choice than you really have. Lately I’ve been using [Discover Cars](https://www.discovercars.com/) because they’re still independent and I’ve consistently found good deals there. They cover most of the world, have been around for ages, and I typically find rates on there that are far less than on the branded websites from Hertz or Alamo.

Sites like this will show you all the available options, both from the big brands everyone has heard of and the regional ones that sometimes offer a better deal. (That Mexican company in the screenshot above, for instance, includes the required liability insurance in the rate instead of charging you a scammy fortune for it like Budget and Europcar do.) You can sort by pickup location, size, and amenities.

If you belong to a loyalty program though or have a discount from AAA or AARP, you might get a better rate going direct and signing in. Or sometimes an airline or hotel chain will send you an e-mail offering a big points bonus if you book through them. Keep an eye out.

Costco members also seem to get a preferential rate through their system that can be cheaper than the general public gets elsewhere. I don’t have personal experience with this, but plenty of friends have scored good deals there.

## Searching all the Hotel Sites

![](https://www.cheapestdestinationsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/trivago-hotel-search.jpg)

There are several players you can use to search hotels prices from a wide range of other sites, including the oldies but goodies like Hotwire and Kayak, as well as HotelsCombined and Trivago. Unfortunately, 3 of the 4 are part of the Expedia group and the other is owned by the same company as Booking/Priceline/Agoda.

Despite all that, Trivago seems to pull in the widest range of options. Because their arrangements are so wide-reaching, you get the big boys everyone has heard of as well as lesser-known sites that have more breadth in specific geographies. When I pulled up a random night in Bratislava, Slovakia, the prices included rates from the hotel chains themselves — which you often don’t see on these comparison sites — plus sites I’ve never heard of like RoomsXXL and StayForLong.

These hotel aggregators usually don’t get paid on commission: they actually make their money from the search traffic they send to the actual online booking agencies or hotel chains displaying their prices. There’s still some parent company corporate favoritism going on in what is displayed as “recommended” though, so use the filters to search by price, location, or amenities to get rid of any bias in the results.

HotelsCombined has a similar model to Trivago and is worth a shot as well. In theory they should be showing the same rates, but sometimes you find a deal on one of these that wasn’t on the other. In both cases you see all the deals in a row, ratings pulled from a variety of reviews, and a description of the hotel. You can search by distance, star rating, etc. Sometimes if I’m not finding a deal I like, I’ll branch out further and also try Kayak and Skyscanner.

Once again, this works best if you’re just trying to find the best deal and not trying to earn loyalty points. Most of the hotel chains do have a price match guarantee though, so if you find a better price on an online travel agency site than you do on Hyatt’s own site for a Hyatt property, they’ll match the rate eventually after you fill out some forms. Or you can just call reservations and book it manually to get the match.

## Being Sure of the Best Airline Deal

When I’m starting a flight search, I’ll usually use some combination of Kayak, Google Flights, and [Skyscanner](https://skyscanner.pxf.io/c/1455585/1098298/13416?associateid=AFF_TRA_19354_00001). All of these are using databases to show multiple options for different combinations and dates. None are complete or foolproof though, so it’s worth investing a little time and also confirming what you find at the official airline website.

I especially love the function in Google Flights where I can see every airport from a destination at once, instead of just one. This is super useful when you need to get to a general area not a specific city or you’re going to have to rent a car anyway, so you’ve got multiple landing options.

It can also tell you what the best deals in the world are from your home airport on any given date if you don’t have your heart set on one place. I pulled up flights from San Francisco for the first week of March and look at where you can go for cheap: Guatemala or Costa Rica for under $400 round trip, Colombia, Ecuador, or Peru for less than $550.

![Using aggregator services to find good flight deals](https://www.cheapestdestinationsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/google-flights-map.jpg)

Alas, you’re not really done with the search process in some cases if the route is served by budget airlines. Some of them, like Allegiant, don’t share their data. Plus sometimes one aggregator will find a way to patch two airlines together that another one won’t. You may have to poke around and try different dates.

One thing to keep in mind with these aggregators: they’ll try to show you the dreaded “basic economy” flights and the budget airline no-baggage options first because they look cheaper. If you want to exclude these options, you have to keep unchecking the box or applying filters for every search, especially on Kayak, which is a real pain.

## Aggregator Tickets on Trains and Buses

![buying train tickets for Europe](https://www.cheapestdestinationsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/train-europe.jpg)

One of the toughest tasks in travel still is figuring out how to get where you’re going without a car or a plane. We have more options than we used to in terms of travel websites for searching, but then they often hand you off to the actual provider because the data systems can’t talk to each other. So you use the aggregator to research, but there’s a good chance you’ll need to go elsewhere to book the tickets — and the end site may not have an English version.

There’s a geographic element to these searches that make some better than others depending on where you’re headed. Rome2Rio and Omio try to cover the world, while [12Go](https://12go.asia/?z=10156349) is the best for Asia and [Wanderu](https://www.wanderu.com/en-us/) is the best for North America. Sometimes you’ll find Busbud useful for searching bus routes in various countries.

These sites can be especially good for figuring out whether a train or a bus will be a better bet, including the east and west coasts of the USA where you have more options for both, or in Europe where nearly the whole continent has ample overland options.

I wore these sites out when traveling through Europe for months on end the past few years, figuring out ways to get from Greece to Albania, Germany to Italy, Budapest to Prague, Karlovy Vary to Munich, and more. Lately I’ve been working out Prague to Bratislava and the Tatras Mountains then back to Vienna.

I also used to use Wanderu a lot to see my options in Florida for getting between Tampa, Orlando, and Miami. In late 2026 I’ll be using 12Go to figure out how to get from A to B all over Southeast Asia.

## There are Still Holes Though…

One of the big [mistakes I see infrequent travelers make](https://www.cheapestdestinationsblog.com/2024/07/24/rookie-travel-mistakes/) is they assume they can find everything worth finding with a one-stop internet search. This is simply not true: you need to shop around every time.

These online travel aggregators can save you time and money, but none of them are foolproof. There are obvious holes in airline searches as mentioned above since thousands of daily flights are not in those databases and others are changing prices hourly. It’s even worse with hotels, where the fat commissions the booking services charge keep many independent hotels from listing with them at all. Sometimes you won’t find those anywhere except their own site. A few times I’ve turned to Google Maps and found a place to stay that wasn’t on any booking site at all.

For apartment rentals, some owners are just on Airbnb, some are just on Vrbo, some are just on Booking.com. Others are on none of the big players, choosing to take bookings directly or through a regional agency you’ve never heard of. Some homes are only listed on a local vacation rental site because they’re annoyed that the booking services are charging such hefty fees as a middleman.

For trains in Europe, here’s what the guy behind the excellent [Man in Seat61 site](http://www.seat61.com/Europe-train-tickets.htm) has to say.

> It would be lovely if there was one website which sold tickets for all European trains at the cheapest price, but no such website exists.  You need to use different websites for different journeys — and sometimes one website for the first part of a journey, and another website for the second.

Sorry, but you’ve still got to do some homework to find the best price. The owners of those travel businesses actually prefer it that way. More difficulty means less price competition. They know that most people won’t bother investing the time to find the best deal. You should.

**Tim Leffel** is the editor of the Cheapest Destinations Blog, Perceptive Travel, and TravelWriting2.com. He is the founder of Al Centro Media and the author of five books, including The World's Cheapest Destinations and [A Better Life for Half the Price](https://cheaplivingabroad.com/). Click on the "About" page in the menu for more.