Disclaimer: I've worked for the OTA Hopper for 7+ years.

> Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline

This is not necessarily true. OTAs are not allowed to list a price that undercuts the airline but there are definitely ways for them to undercut the price that the booker ends up paying e.g. offering credits that they can redeem on future flight bookings. In this scenario the airline still gets paid the full amount for the ticket and the OTA makes up the difference.

Airlines are fully within their right to withhold inventory from OTAs that do this, but that entirely depends on the relationship that the OTA has with the airline. In some cases airlines actually run discount campaigns through OTAs in order to capture a bit more market share or fill inventory that they're not seeing being booked through their first party website.

>I can assure you any "add-ons" offered by a third party are ultimately a scam

This is definitely not true. Any kind of insurance product offered by third parties are essentially just that. Hopper's "cancel for any reason" insurance is essentially paying a premium to make your ticket fully refundable. Typically airline inventory managers price refundable tickets at a fixed premium and there's an opportunity there for OTAs to essentially undercut that premium because it's a naive model.

> Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline

Technically true in that they can't undercut the airline on the same fare class.

But there are many different fare classes and some of them are only offered via 3rd parties, so you can often get much better deals via e.g., Expedia than you can by going direct to the airline.

Just this year my family flew Melbourne-Madrid then Milan-Melbourne, both legs on Cathay, but this route was only available on Expedia (and maybe other OTAs too, I don't remember) - all I know was that it was impossible to even search for this route on Cathay's own website. We didn't have any issues, but if we did I don't know if I'd worry about Expedia's customer service being much worse than an airline's own service.

> We didn't have any issues, but if we did I don't know if I'd worry about Expedia's customer service being much worse than an airline's own service.

The problem (speaking as someone who has to deal with Travel Agents many, many times) is that Expedia will say it's Cathay's problem, and Cathay will refuse to speak to you and tell you it's Expedia's problem.

This has happened to me so many times with both flights and hotels. Now I very rarely book through third parties (only search) unless the discounted rate is compelling enough.

It just happened to me 2 weeks ago. I booked a resort in Cancun through Chase Travel at a heavily-discounted rate and made an error in booking, for one person versus needing two. Chase said they couldn't change it and to call the resort, their middle agency said they couldn't change it, and the resort said they couldn't change it and to call the agent! It eventually got fixed after hours of calling and essentially pleading.

Who was the one who eventually was able to change it?

It’s always the travel agent.

I'm very late to this, but actually it was the resort in this case. The whole process was clearly very undocumented and had a very backroom-y feel to it but they made it happen.

> Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline

How come I regularly see third-party OTAs offer the same itineraries cheaper than the airline then?

Sometimes there's a mystery fee added just before payment, but not nearly always – and I've flown such itineraries once or twice myself (if the difference was significant and I was absolutely certain I wouldn't need any change or extra service).

I was under the impression that these effectively share part of their agent fee with the traveler as a form of kickback (to appear as the cheapest option in search, which in the end might end up a win-win for both).

One trick they use is to book via a different country. Flight from A to B when booked on the main English website in dollars can be a higher price than the same leg being booked on the Russian website in rubles.

Two reasons for that, one can be because the airline is less known in that market and whats to price more aggressively, and the other is that the ticket conditions are slightly different. For example your right to get compensation in case of a delay (and how much) may be different between those tickets.

One way I've heard is they don't book your ticket immediately but predict when the airline's price will go down and book in then. I imagine they have far better data to enable price prediction than the general public, and can spread the cost of getting it wrong over their other customers.

At least the ones I’ve used have always sent me a ticket number within at most a few hours, and usually instantly. I’d be surprised if that really was a factor these days.

From what I remember from working in the industry many years ago, the process is actually split into (at least) 3 parts.

1. Reservation

2. Booking

3. Ticketing

Each step has its own expiration dates set by the airline, which can range from "instant" to several days/weeks. They may also set different cancelation fees for each step. A smart travel agent could in theory use this to cancel an old booking and book again if the price is reduced, but I think some airlines have changed their practice to avoid this.

Keep in mind that I mostly worked for the European market. I know US airlines operate a bit differently from the rest of the world. They usually have more flexible rules around flights and exchanging of tickets.

>A smart travel agent could in theory use this to cancel an old booking and book again if the price is reduced, but I think some airlines have changed their practice to avoid this.

This is called churn and airlines are pretty on top of it. If you do this often then it will completely ruin your relationship with the airline. Maybe individual travel agencies can get away with it if they're trying to book a handful of tickets each week but OTAs can't.

> I think some airlines have changed their practice to avoid this.

AFAIK even direct connections still use the pattern of creating a PNR, confirming the booking, and then issuing a ticket. Even so in the US, airlines have to guarantee a full refund if a domestic flight is cancelled within 24 hours of booking.

Airlines own systems are often awful UI and in case of some asian low costers your data is immediately sold to spammers (and they collect as much your data as they can too).

Depends on exact case but if traveling on a budget going with low costers and connections a good third party can be better than an unknown shitty airline's system.

I used Expedia a few years back, got a lower price and could cancel for full refund within a day but they probably don't do that anymore. Kiwi seemed okay. Ctrip now owned by China.

I'd be very careful with Kiwi. They don't have official OTA agreements with all the airlines they resell; at least Ryanair at one point was actively hostile towards them, and Kiwi was working with personal Ryanair accounts to get around their roadblocks. This in turn meant I couldn't access Ryanair's mobile boarding passes and had to find a printer on short notice at the airport.

While airlines can apparently not legally completely prevent such "uncooperative" third-party resellers, and I do have some sympathy for the business model, it's not great to be stuck between travel agent and airline when things go wrong.

Other OTAs like Experian actually take the role of a good old travel agent (the entity historically doing much of the ticketing work the airlines are now doing directly) and will usually only sell you itineraries of interlining (i.e. cooperating) airlines, and also only of airlines that accept travel agents as business partners in the first place.

I have bad experiences with Kiwi and ctrip and a bunch of other ones. The support is indeed terrible and if anything goes wrong, the airline will tell you to contact the 3rd party agent... which has horrible support so there you are, stuck somewhere in asia. I had multiple occasions in which I just booked another ticket because of their incompetence, losing a few $100 as I could not take the risk of being late. Now I only book directly at the airline: at that time the company was booking and they just took what google flights gave them, which is often not directly at the airline.

Expedia still offers refunds within 24 hours. At least for every flight I've booked originating from the US in the last few years.

I thought it was because of the DoT rule, but apparently they wouldn't be subject to that.

> I still have fond memories of their legendary (pre-leetcode) coding challenges [0] posted on the T

Those ITA puzzle ads on the T (Boston MBTA subway) got my interest. They were so much better for introvert thinkers, than getting ambushed in a Google interview context, and there was also no interference from a bad-loop interviewer.

> they also hosted the Boston Lisp users group in the early 2000s

IIRC, those meetings were organized by Faré Rideau. Volunteering meeting space was maybe ITA (then Google) and Northeastern University?

(I made the small contribution of building the the Boston Lisp announcements email list, by promising a lot of people, wary of social media, that it would be announcements-only. This included famous people, who I'd read about as a kid, such as in the Steven Levy book, or knew only from their names on books and standards documents.)

Incidentally, speaking of brilliant big names in programming... in a few weeks, Gregor Kiczales, Hal Abelson, and Gerald Sussman are speaking at RacketCon 2024. https://con.racket-lang.org/

> Having worked a bit in the travel industry, I highly recommend that you never book through a third party (by all means use their search). Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline and typically have abysmal customer service,

That’s not always true. I’ve often used services like Skyscanner to find a flight, then checked directly on the airline's website, and the prices didn’t match. Sometimes, it depends on which country you're in too. For example, I once looked at the same flight on Lufthansa’s German site and on a localized version for another country, and the price was different due to taxes. By a third part, I never had a different price depending on which country you are buying it.

However, nowadays, I still prefer to book directly through the airlines, though, because when they cancel your flight—and they’ve been doing that quite a lot since COVID—you have a better chance of holding them accountable.

> Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline

I've paid much less (on international round-trip flights originating USA) on justfly.com than I could find on the airline's own site.