Agoda vs Expedia for flights Bookings

Agoda

Agoda flights has come a long way in the last few year. When we first wrote this review sometime in 2020, is was missing a huge amount of important features, but thankfully it looks like most of these have been added in now finally making Agoda a worthwhile site to book flights (note it’s always been great for hotels).

riginally for round-trip flights, Agoda was offering paired combinations, i.e. you select both your outbound and your inbound flights at the same time. However they have now moved to the opposite model, where you select the outbound and inbound flights separately. Generally we think that this offers a better experience to the customer, as there are typically more combinations which can be found.

While previous versions only allowed searching for adults, it’s possible to book tickets for children and infants as well. There’s a few more filter options these days which should cover all your basic needs like filtering by price, departure and arrival times and airline. It is however missing a few more advanced features like the ability to filter by stopover city, or by airlines within a certain alliance for those you love to chase airline points. There’s a great number of sorting options though, some of the most comprehensive we have seen.

Agoda features a price calendar whereby the cheapest prices for your particular flight are listed on the calendar when you are selecting your flight dates. Unfortunately they are not color coded like some other sites making it a little bit difficult to use. Similarly, once you’ve searched for a flight at the top of the page you can see the price for different days around the same time of yours.

What I particularly like about Agoda flights is that they list a lot of the onboard inclusions for each flight, as well as whether they are free or paid, such as whether meals, alcohol and entertainment are included in the price.

If you click in the details of any particular flight they now clearly list the amount of baggage included with the ticket, as well the change and cancellation policies and any fees involved. From what we could see these tickets conditions were always in line with the airline’s official conditions. Having said that this didn’t seem to apply to some international flight, where we instead directed to the airline’s official website. Actually, this should be the most accurate, it’s just a pity you need to leave the website to get this information. There still seems to be a few peculiarities about the site though, for example on the search results page it would indicate that the some flights had baggage allowance included, but didn’t for other flights, even within the same airline. For flights which did include baggage, this information could always be found by clicking through another screen but it’s bizarre that they don’t display this information on the search results page.

We found that checking out was relatively painless, with only the necessary information being required. We also found that domestic flights don’t require ID information to be entered, which is a mistake some other OTAs make. Insurance is offered on this page as well, but luckily there’s not a lot of other upsells. The insurance also includes cancellation for unseen circumstances (e.g. you get sick), so this might be a good thing to consider.

One interesting feature is the ability to add a flight to your cart, and then purchase other flights and or hotels at the same time in the same transaction. This is relatively rate for online travel agencies, although obviously common for other types of ecommerce sites.

So how does Agoda stack up for pricing? We compared 10 popular flight routes against Expedia to get a better idea.

Route	Type	Agoda Flights	Expedia Flights
Los Angeles to New York	One Way	$108	$117
Orlando to Chicago	One Way	$64	$75
Los Angeles to Honolulu	One Way	$235	$256
Pittsburgh to Boston	Round-trip	$207	$189
Seattle to Portland	Round-trip	$159	$147
Los Angeles to Las Vegas	Round-trip	$64	$64
Los Angeles to Sydney	One Way	$803	$904
Los Angeles to Shanghai	One Way	$806	$900
Singapore to Tokyo	Round-trip	$444	$555
New York to London	Round-trip	$818	$918

Overall the pricing seems very competitive with Expedia, especially for US domestic flights, but also but international flights. In fact sometimes the cheapest flight they offered was up to 20% cheaper than Expedia. This is often because Agoda is better at combining different airlines which means that they can offer a better price. As with most of the other competitors, Agoda don’t charge any booking or credit card fees for flights so you don’t need to worry about being stung by any extra hidden fees.

Overall we found the flight availability to on Agoda to be quite good, with all the major flights we checked able to be found. It’s not as good at pairing together combinations with different airlines like some other OTA competitors, but this represents a relatively small amount of flight in reality.

Flights are available on all three of Agoda’s platforms, Desktop, Mobile and the mobile app available on both iOS and Android. These platforms are all available in around 39 languages at the time of publication.

The payment options seem to be a little bit lacking compared to their hotel offering, Only credit and debit cards can be used from MasterCard, Visa, AMEX and JCB. Still, this should be enough for most people. There also didn’t appear to be any additional charges listed for the different payment types, which is a pleasant change from most airlines.

Agoda is a very reliable company when it comes to booking hotels, but they are relatively new when it comes to flight tickets. Having said that, we wouldn’t hesitate to book with them considering they are backed by Booking.com and definitely worth your consideration.

Agoda offers telephone support (via local phone numbers), online chat via their app as well as email support. However they don’t make most of these options easy to find – usually you’ll have to click a “Show more options” link in the help section. Unfortunately for flights, it appears that at the moment, only phone support is available. Hopefully Agoda will increase these options with time.

Agoda has significantly evolved its flight booking platform in the last few years. Previously lacking in essential features, it now allows users to separately choose outbound and inbound flights for increased flexibility. The platform is inclusive, catering to adult, child, and infant travelers. The addition of various filters for selection by price, departure and arrival times, and airlines enhances usability. While missing advanced features like filter by stopover city, Agoda stands out with its detailed onboard inclusions list and clear baggage, change, and cancellation policies for each flight. The checkout process is straightforward, and the website also provides the unique feature of adding flights to a cart for combined purchases with hotels. Payment is currently limited to credit and debit cards, and no extra charges apply. Agoda's pricing is competitive, with rates often cheaper than other platforms due to its adept combination of different airlines. Despite being new in the flights sector, Agoda's backing by Booking.com makes it a reliable choice. Although Agoda needs to improve accessibility to its customer support, its flight booking service is conveniently available on all desktop and mobile platforms in 39 languages.

Expedia

Expedia is one of the original online travel agencies, having been established back in the 90s. These days it fits within the Expedia group which includes other sites like Orbitz and Travelocity. Expedia operates in almost all markets around the world, but being a US operated company means that this is where there advantage is.

For round-trip tickets, Expedia displays the outbound route on the first page, and then allows you to select the return leg on the next page, whereas some other travel sites let you select both together. They do clearly indicate flights where baggage is not included, but don’t specifically let you know how much baggage is actually included, instead redirecting you to the airline’s own website, somewhat defeating the point of the site in the first place in our opinion. Likewise for change and cancellation fees they tell you that fees will apply but don’t specific how much these fees are. Filters offered are relatively simple, but unlike some competitors they don’t offer more advanced filters like filtering by your transfer point for multi-leg flights. Their flexible dates calendar is quite nice, giving you a grid view enabling you to adjust both the departure and return dates to get the best price. If the COVID-19 pandemic has got you worried, Expedia provides information about the practices of each airport on the search results page. Strangely, rather than let you filter by flights with or without baggage, Expedia adds a second airline into the filters where baggage is included, e.g. Jetstar and Jetstar with Baggage. They do however allow you to filter by flexible flights with no change fees whereas some other sites don’t. This is particularly important during these uncertain times. These flights are also clearly marked with a ‘No change fee’ tag on the search results page. We found Expedia’s search functionality to be generally fairly reliable, supporting states, countries, cities and even landmarks. As Expedia makes most of their money by selling hotels, you’ll consistently be asked to bundle a hotel with your flight. While slightly annoying (assuming you’re not looking to book a hotel), the prompts are not too intrusive and can easily be cancelled. For the flights which we looked at purchasing, we could at extra baggage, but there was no option to select our own seats, even for a cost. Other competitor sites offered this on the same flight. There were also no other options to book meals etc., whereas some of the local online travel agencies can offer this. On each booking you also have the opportunity to earn Expedia points which can be use to save money on your next Expedia booking. This is great, except that ironically they can’t be used to purchase flights which is somewhat self-defeating. While this restriction can also be found on some other travel sites, there are other sites which allow it. If you’re travelling with infants, you can specific whether they need a seat or will be traveling on your lap – most other sites can’t offer this so it’s a definite plus.

As Expedia operates as an agency of certain airlines, this means that there are often significant payment fees attached to your booking. Expedia is reasonably upfront with this though, detailing the exact fees throughout the process. Typically the exact fees will vary depending on which payment method you are planning to use. Overall, we’ve found Expedia’s pricing to be average as best. While there are certainly great deals to be had we certainly haven’t noticed any pricing which would strongly encourage us to buy from them. This is typical in the airline industry however, where margins are often razor thin.

While Expedia likes to constantly tell you on their website how many airlines that they work with, we’ve never found their coverage to be particularly great. The selection of major airlines is fine (as with all other online travel agencies), however their selection of low cost carriers is poor. Airlines like SouthWest (in the US) and Ryanair (UK/EU) can’t be found at all, or at least aren’t directly bookable, several rival online travel agencies have found a way to work around this.

Expedia’s platforms are available in around 40 different languages so it’s unlikely that you’re ever going to have a problem there. In addition, besides their website they also have a mobile app and mobile website. The only disappointing thing is that for several of the products on the app, they are essentially just links to the mobile-web version.

Expedia accept all major credit cards as well as PayPal. Unfortunately, they don’t offer any other payment methods like Apple Pay and Google Pay, or any buy-now-pay-later options like AfterPay or ZIP pay. Somewhat surprisingly they also don’t offer Gift Cards, although their Hotels.com arm actually does.

Generally speaking, Expedia’s booking service is quite reliable, however there is a big cloud hanging over their post-sale customer service, particularly in regards to long waiting times. They score a miserly 1.3 out of 5 or Trustpilot, however this isn’t necessarily the best way to determine the reputation of a business.

Expedia offers an online chatbot which can take care of quite a few of your standard requests and is quite advanced. You can also call them, however their phone number can be quite difficult to find on the website, you’ll have to answer a few questions minimum before it’s revealed to you. Expedia has a reputation of long-wait times on the phone, so be prepared before you call.

Expedia is definitely an option worth checking out, however it’s policies and functionality doesn’t match a lot of its competitors. If you’re traveling in North America they should probably be your first choice if availability and price are the most important thing to you, but look elsewhere if good customer service is a must for you.