A travel site that includes all airlines, or a list of excluded airlines?

April 26, 2007 8:27 AM

Are there travel websites that include all airlines, including discount ones like Southwest? Or, do all these websites exclude the same discount carriers, and which carriers are excluded?

Like most frequent travellers (I imagine), I use a combination of travel sites (travelocity, orbitz) and airline sites (aa, delta) to look for cheap fares. I know that the biggest sites exclude discount carriers like Southwest. Is there a site out there that crawls even the discount carriers?

I've scanned the two posts, and was happy to find farecast, sidestep, and kayak. But do sidestep and kayak capture all the discount providers? Or am I stuck trying to figure out which discount carriers go where I'm going and going to their websites?

posted by mdion to travel & transportation (11 comments total)

Southwest intentionally removed itself from aggregator websites a few years ago.
posted by Burhanistan at 8:33 AM on April 26, 2007

Just the other day apparently, Kayak started including a link on its search results to automatically search the Southwest website for matching flights: http://blogs.nypost.com/travel/archives/2007/04/breaking_no_rea.html

It's not as good as having the Southwest flights totally integrated in the Kayak search results, but at least you can check Southwest in one extra click.
posted by zachlipton at 8:41 AM on April 26, 2007

Sites like Orbitz are actually organized by the major spoke and hub airlines, and tend not to have airlines outside the group that runs them. Southwest in particular doesn’t include there results in these kinds of sites; kayak on the…on preview what those folks said… discount sites that sell space on under booked flights like priceline also only sell tickets with a group of airlines they have agreements with.
posted by French Fry at 8:48 AM on April 26, 2007

Orbitz' founders -- American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Air Lines Northwest Airlines and Continental Airlines

Sabre - founded by American Airlines... and there's a fascinating history out there on the intertubes about it's development - and controversy.

I don't think you're going to find what you're looking for, but good luck. All of the major travel sites are owned by the major airlines, and they are tailored to only show you their flights - or in the case of American Airlines and Sabre in the past, only show you their flights first.
posted by matty at 8:52 AM on April 26, 2007

travelzoo
posted by goldism at 9:48 AM on April 26, 2007

i won't say it includes EVERY airline for certain, but have you tried the search from ITA software? ITA writes pricing software, and you can use their online search to get prices, select routes, and get the code you need to actually buy the ticket for the listed price. My favorite are the flexible date searches: cheapest in a 30 day period, and cheapest weekends
posted by whatzit at 10:01 AM on April 26, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Away.com searches Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire, Kayak, Expedia, CheapTickets & Priceline simultaneously. Includes discount airlines.
posted by miss lynnster at 11:12 AM on April 26, 2007

FYI, Away.com is owned by Travelport, which also owns Orbitz.
posted by armage at 12:17 PM on April 26, 2007

Descriptions of still-in-private-beta service, Yapta, seem to suggest that it will allow you to bookmark and track Southwest flights. It's supposed to go into public beta in May.
posted by junesix at 1:06 PM on April 26, 2007

Airfare Watchdog boasts that it's the only airfare aggregator that includes Southwest. Unfortunately, it's more for letting you know about great deals leaving your home city rather than being an exhaustive search like kayak, but I think it's the closest to what you're looking for.
posted by granted at 2:44 PM on April 26, 2007

Thanks for all the suggestions.
posted by mdion at 1:57 PM on April 27, 2007