Trip.com vs Agoda for flights Bookings

Trip.com

Trip.com is rapidly expanding, with their website and mobile app now available in over 30 markets around the world. One of the best things about Trip.com is that it’s much more transparent than some of the competitors, always displaying information about baggage, change, cancellations and more, and that their customer service always picks up the phone almost instantly. When you combine this with some of the best pricing in the industry, it’s no wonder that Trip.com is making such an impact lately.

Let’s start with the basics – single trips, round-trips and multi-leg trips are all supported. International and domestic flights are both covered also. Their site also offers a useful price graph to determine which day is the cheapest, although its results do vary. You can also set multiple destinations and see which is the cheapest which is definitely a cool feature, but as with above, it’s not 100% accurate. Searching via the map is a another nifty feature if you have a budget but don’t know where you can fly with it. When booking a return flight Trip.com has recently added the option to select first the outbound leg and then the return leg, or to select them both at the same time with the “Switch Selection Mode” feature. Once rather peculiar feature that they have are “late-issued” tickets, which can be issued any time up to 72 hours before a flight. They are guaranteed to be issued, so you aren’t taking much of a risk, however they can be unnerving. In our own experience, they are actually usually issued much quicker, in fact when we book one it was issued within a few hours. Regardless, these tickets are always clearly marked as such so the choice is always yours. In the plus side, this kind of ticket is usually excellently priced. Compared with some of its competitors, Trip.com’s search functionality is a little bit lacking. You can’t search by attraction, and if there’s no airport where you want to go forget it, where other online travel sites will give you nearby recommendations, Trip.com will give you nothing. In terms of filters, they allow you to filter by flights with checked baggage which is definitely helpful, however there’s no option to search by flights with free changes or cancellation which would be very useful. Another great feature for those who travel frequently is the option to filter by airlines alliance like OneWorld – particularly useful if you’re trying to rack up those frequent flyer miles. We tend to find Trip.com a little bit annoying when searching for return flights. If you select your outbound leg on a premium airline, it will still show results for low cost carriers for the return trip up the top of the page. It seems extremely unlikely that people would match these two types of flights together. Trip.com is quite different than other travel sites, in that it often gives you multiples prices for the same flight, but with different booking conditions. Once you’ve made your booking, Trip.com will automatically send you an e-receipt, and you can reissue yourself one at an time, even with a company name on it if you did.

If you search on comparison sites like Skyscanner, you’ll find that Trip.com has some very competitive prices for flights. One things to look our for though are the change and cancellation fees, as they might not be in line with the airline’s own fees. There is no booking fee or credit card fees when booking with Trip.com They don’t charge extra for changes and cancellations, they simply pass on the cost that the airline or their supplier charges them. As with most OTA’s, make sure to pay attention to the change and cancellation charges before booking as they might not be in line with the airline’s own charges. Generally speaking though, Trip.com does quite a good job at outlining these fees up front. On some rare occasions though the fees are not displayed and a simple message stating “Check with the airline” is displayed which can be somewhat disappointing.

Trip.com provides worldwide coverage and it’s rare to find flights which they don’t have, which the usual exceptions like Southwest who don’t make their flights available to online travel sites. Having said that, in terms of pricing, you’ll find that flights within Asia and to-and-from Asia are their strongest point. Bear in mind that with their global ambitions, this is likely changing fairly rapidly.

Trip.com is available on desktop, mobile, and through their iOS and Android apps - which is what they are best known for. It’s also available in more than 20 languages including Arabic, which not many other competitors can provide (app only).

In terms of payment, Trip.com accepts major credit cards including Visa, Mastercard and American Express. They also accept PayPal, although it only appears to be available for major currencies. The mobile apps also accept both Apple Pay and Google, which are also somewhat supported on their desktop site. Besides this, iDealpay is accepted when paying in Euros, NaverPay when paying in Korean Won, and Wechat Pay and Alipay if paying in Chinese Yuan. Generally speaking, this is one of the most comprehensive payment experiences of any online flight booking site.

Trip.com’s reputation is not fantastic – although having said that no OTA is. If we look at sites like Trustpilot though we can see that in between the porr comments there are an awful lot of highly positive comments, so they’re obviously doing something right. Given that they lay out all the information fairly well, it’s likely a lot of the unsatisfied customers are simply people who have booked non-refundable flights and want to get a refund.

Trip.com offers customer service over the phone through a series of local phone numbers, through email, and through online chat on their app and website. From our testing, both phone calls and mobile chat are always answered almost instantly, instantly scoring big points on our test – in fact they were the only OTA where we experienced this. One of the great things about Trip.com is that you can actually do a great deal of things without any need for customer service, like make changes and cancellations on any booking (where rules permit).

Trip.com is not nearly as established in international markets as players like Expedia when it comes to flights, however with the backing of their parent company they’re able to deliver some excellent prices with good reliability and excellent customer service. If you haven’t heard of Trip.com yet, you’ll be hearing about them soon.

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.