Frequent fliers know that there is an art to finding good deals on airfare. Booking early is a sure way of getting better prices, but sometimes it just comes down to comparison shopping. Unfortunately, there are so many individual flight search engines on the internet that performing this kind of search can quickly become tedious and unnecessarily time consuming — although it is a nice distraction from packing.
Hoping to resolve this issue, Momondo created a clean and efficient search aggregator that compiles results from over 800 different travel sites so that you can input your query once and get all the results you need. Having been successful with their web-based system, the company has finally released an app that allows you to take their powerful searching service on the road. We take a look at it after the jump.
Take-Off
The mentality behind Momondo’s system seems to be offering deep search capabilities without any unnecessary features. You won’t find any thorough trip planning capabilities like you might in TripIt, for instance. That being said, the lean approach works very well for the app since it allows you to focus on this particular aspect of planning without getting too involved in the follow-up.
Find a Flight
The core of the app is obviously the search itself, and Momondo has made it as streamlined as possible; The search interface appears front and center as soon as you start it up. After selecting whether you’re after a return trip (the default) or a one-way flight, you can tap the From and To fields to search for your destination.
Flight Searching in Momondo
Once you’ve narrowed down which airport you’d like to fly into, Momondo displays the flights it has found across all of the networks it crawls through. The results show up surprisingly quickly considering the number of sources the app is searching, and they are displayed in a well-designed layout that highlights important information such as price (in the currency of your choice), number of stops, airline, flight duration and departure/arrival times.
Filter & Save Flights
Once you have a list of flights, you can narrow down your search using convenient filters that let you select options pertaining to price, departure time, arrival time, number of stops, airline, etc. This is an excellent way to sift through a long list of flights to zero in on the ones that fit your situation and budget best.
Filter Flights
Once you have a flight selected, you can book it on the spot, and it’s easy to save it for later and/or email the details to yourself or your co-travelers for review if you prefer. The saved list functions as you expect it to, and while it’s a handy way to keep track of the flights you’re considering, the one great omission is that you can’t set up notifications for changes. This means that you’ve got to check back on the flights manually to see if the prices have fluctuated or anything of the sort. It’s a crucial gap in the app’s functionality that, for now, leaves the saved flights feature looking a bit incomplete.
Saving Flights for Later
Conclusion
While Momondo is undoubtedly one of the finest solutions for flight searching around, the app still needs a bit of work before it catches up with the functionality of the website. Beyond the lack of update notifications for saved flights, the app is also missing the robust hotel and car rental portions of the service, meaning that you still need to resort to another app (or the website) to look up a place to stay once you arrive at your destination. This is a particularly strange thing to leave out since the Momondo web service provides the functionality and the app is otherwise a straight port of the site’s features.
Aside from those missing links though, Momondo is easy to recommend because it offers a fast and well-designed system for getting you from point A to point B in your travel planning routine. The fact that it does this for free is just icing on the cake.
Have you used Momondo to book a flight before? Have another flight search solution that you prefer? Tell us about it in the comments!