Agoda vs Flight Centre 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.

Flight Centre

Flight Centre is Australia’s largest offline travel agency, owning more than 5,000 physical stores in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and more. In recent years they’ve slowly been improving their online offering to work in tandem with their physical stores with good results. Their online flights offering is quite similar overall, not as feature packed as some of the main competitors, but at the same time is very smooth and easy to use.

Their online search support both one-way and return flights, however if you’re looking to book something more complicated like a multi-leg or around-the-world flight, you’re still going to need to call them or go into a store. The search functionality works nicely, allowing you to search for cities, countries and airports, but unfortunately doesn’t allow you to search by state/province or by a particular landmark which some competitors can offer. By default, Flight Centre sorts its flight by placing the Non-stop flights at the top, and then by order of price which is nice. Generally speaking, Flight Centre’s filtering options are fairly basic – there’s no options like sorting by airport, transfer airport, flights with/without baggage included, flights with free cancellation/changes, are many more.. The basic choice like airline and departure time are there though. Their system allows you to book both the outbound and inbound leg of flight at the same time which is probably the most user-friendly, but doesn’t allow you to mix and match whichever flights you want. Finding the change and cancellation conditions on Flight Centre’s website is almost impossible. While it does give you the option to find these, they are displayed in the raw form. In essence this means you need to read through pages and pages of almost non-understandable text to find what is relevant for you. Other OTAs clearly state the charges for changes and cancellation up front. Similarly, the site tells you that baggage is permitted, but doesn’t actually tell you how much in included making it barely useful (this is only the case for some flights, not all).

Pricing tends to be on the high side, however Flight Centre does offer very good deals from time-to-time, and airlines only deals are also normally visible on their website. While they don’t charge any online booking fee which is important, there is a “merchant fee” depending on which payment method you use. Only PoLi Pay is available without any fees.

We generally found Flight Centre’s availability to be fairly poor when it came to non-Australian flights. Also, due to the fact that Fight Centre matches the inbound and outbound legs of your return flight automatically, users don’t also get the same level of choices that they might on other sites.

Flight Centre offers a mobile app, mobile website and desktop website, much like most of the competition. The platform however is only available in English, so it’s offerings are very much localized to English-speaking audiences.

For flight booking, Flight Centre offers a quite reasonable selection of credit/debit card options, with Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Diners all accepted. Besides this they also offer PayPal, as well of PoLi Pay for those in Australia. Unfortunately they don’t appear to offer Google Pay or Apple Pay for people who prefer those.

In Australia at least, Flight Center generally has a fairly good reputation, with real, local customer service representatives who are able to assist when things go wrong.

Flight Centre prefers communication by phone, so what you’ll find on their website is a series of easy-to-find phone numbers for assistance. They don’t, however, offer any kind of online chat system or email which is somewhat disappointing. This could potentially be an issue is you’re stuck overseas and only have a Wi-Fi connection.

If you happen to be in Australia then Flight Centre is a reasonable option worth checking out. While their online offering isn’t amazing, they’re a time-tested brand which isn’t going anywhere quickly. Despite the website being basic compared to the competition we found it somewhat refreshing and easy to use, as long as you already know what you’re looking for.