Searching For Treasure (Or Flights) With Momondo

When it comes to researching flights, I’d say we know a few tricks of the trade. We have looked up thousands of flights over recent years and flight search engines have made this process so much easier. You can compare flights from numerous airlines and booking agents side-by-side to pick the perfect flight and time for your next trip.

Not all flight search engines are made equal. What sets out the best from the rest is the user experience – the key functionality, the user interface, the speed, mobile access and the bells and whistles.

So I put Momondo to the test to see how it compares.

When it comes to a smooth user interface, in my opinion, Momondo comes out on top. The gentle animations, clever layout and easy-to-read styling make searching for flights a real joy. Keep in mind that as a web designer with a decade and a half of experience, it takes a lot to impress me.

Here’s a more detailed breakdown of what I like about the search results page:

A) Easily compare lowest pricing on multiple days.

B) At a glance see the cheapest ticket price.

C) At a glance see the fastest ticket price.

D) One of my favourite features, and particularly intuitive – a simple smiley face score of how good the ticket price is combined with the flying time. Sometimes you can see a super cheap ticket but it takes twice as long as all the others because of additional stopovers. This visual indicator gets straight to the point.

E) See the individual ticket price as well as the total price for our whole group. Sometimes it’s easy to overlook the small price differences of individual tickets, but when 4 people are flying, the savings start to add up.

F) 1-click access to more granular detail of the flight.

G) If you’re not ready to book now, get daily alerts via email whenever the price of the ticket changes.

H) Additional filtering tools to only see flights between certain times or from particular airports

There are times when we book multiple flights and try to reduce the transit time in an airport. For this, the “Timetable” view is particularly helpful. It shows all the flights in a compact view sorted by time of the day. There are occasions that we won’t mind paying an small premium to book a better matching flight so we don’t have to wait around an airport for half a day.

However, where Momondo really shines for me is the “Flight Insight”. There are travel hacks that were previously only known by experienced travel agents or seasoned flyers, and now these are all available to you too.

The data provided here allows you to plan your flight so you can get the best possible price. Find out what are the real variables causing changes to your ticket price – airline, season, airport, days of the week and even time of the day. You can easily save over 50% or more from your ticket price with the valuable insights at your fingertips.

Every airline, city and rout is different, so you get the precise granular information for your specific flight.

The desktop website is only half the story. What about when you’re out and about? Momondo’s mobile app is just as handy on the small screen. The mobile interface sports similar elements to the desktop website for consistency, but is very much optimised to make the best use of screen space.

I tend to jump around when searching for flights so the search history makes it easier to compare results without waiting for the data to reload. The only feature I miss from the desktop website is easily comparing a full month of flight prices to see which day is cheaper.

If you can’t decide on where to go on your next holiday, the Momondo mobile app now has a unique feature called “Friend Compass” which connects to your Facebook account and determines where your friends are located compared to your current location. It also matches up weather and flight information in addition to seeing how much it will cost to fly to your friend. So if you’re in Europe with a long weekend coming up, what better way to spend it than surprise your friend a few countries away!

The mobile app is completely free and available on iOS and Android so no one misses out.

One last handy feature I wanted to point out is the multiple destinations feature in the search tool. We shared in an earlier post about our secrets to scoring the cheapest flights, that booking your own multi-leg flights can save you hundreds of dollars. Momondo makes this even easier by allowing you to search multiple legs at one time – a real timesaver!

In the competitive airline industry there are always bargain flights to be found if you know where to look. And Momondo is like my personal gold detector to unearth cheap flight treasures that are waiting to be discovered.

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Features

• Search and compare cheap flight tickets, hotels and hostels.
• Sort the flight and hotel results by price, airport, route, airline, departure and arrival hours, reviews, property types, facilities and themes.
• Book directly from the website and mobile app.
• Save money by finding the cheapest possible prices and make multiple bookings perfectly tailored to your journey.

Specs

• Mobile app operating system: iOS and Android
• Mobile app size: 34.5 MB
• Languages: English, Bokmål, Norwegian, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian