LIST: ONLINE TRAVEL AGENCIES / PORTALS (NON-SPECIALIST)
These are online agencies aimed at, or appropriate for, British travellers. The dividing line between a travel agency that has a website and an online travel agency can be a little fuzzy. This list is focused on travel websites that have a distinct online brand identity. The ability to complete a transaction online is important but not crucial. | |||||
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| A2B Travel | This site (originally owned by the EMAP publishing group and now part of OTC - see below) has been selling discounted fares from a huge range of flights since Jan 98 and until Travelocity.co.uk came along it was considered the UK's answer to Travelocity.com. A2B is definitely one of the grown-ups when it comes to multi-leg ticketing. |
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| Airline Network | Refreshingly simple and quick site to use. The fares and holiday prices it comes up with are not bad either. Independent company based in Preston, Lancs that's been around since the early nineties and always been competitive. | ||||
| Air Miles | Air Miles is turning itself from a travel club for loyalty point collectors into a mainstream online travel agency for everyone. Collectors will still be able to pay with their points but non-collectors can also buy flights, hotels, car hire and last minute breaks & packages with cash... or rather, credit card. | ||||
| AirTickets.co.uk | 'Travelocity' by another URL. | ||||
| BargainHolidays | Easy to use. A sister-site to A2B Travel (Launched in July 97. Originally owned by the EMAP publishing group and now part of OTC - see below), it is now the most popular online agency for holiday packages in the UK with visitors looking at over 9 million pages every month. They claim to have over 2 million package holidays on their database, mostly from the big players (Thomsons, JMC, Cosmos, etc). Flight bookings can be made online (A2B engine), holiday booking are made by phone with the holiday operator quoting a Ref No. and city breaks can be booked online or by phone. | ||||
| Beachtowel | Beachtowel is an independent online agency - actually, a call-centre agency in leicester called Affilated Travel Services - selling late breaks, holidays, flights etc. For shortbreaks you are switched to Superbreaks.com hotel booking engine. | ||||
| Best@Travel.co.uk | One of a group of themed portals (eg. best@hotels, best@citybreaks, best@luxuryholidays, best@carhire, etc) owned by Worldwide Journeys PLC, with each concentrating on different markets and not always, as you might expect, simply selling the same stock of flights, cars, hotels under a different name. | ||||
| Biggles | Easy to use site but only to search for flights, hotels car hire & holidays. It won't do pricing online or take bookings. You have to phone them for that. | ||||
| Bookable Holidays | Simple to use online agent selling packages from mainstream reputable operator brands such as Virgin, Crystal, First Choice, Argo, and Panorama. There's also a DIY section based on low-cost flights. Bookings are made by phone. BH won Travel Trade Gazette (weekly trade newspaper) 'Call Centre of the Year' in 2005. | ||||
| BT Openworld Travel Club | BT Openworld Travel Club opened in August 2002 as an exclusive subscription-based travel promotions service for the ISP's customers, offering tickets to unusual or prestigious events in Europe (eg rock concerts, golf tournaments, yacht races), bargain flights and holidays, and travel insurance. The service is operated by OTC (one of their 'white label' sites - see below). | ||||
| Budgetholidays.com | TUI-UK's (Thomsons parent company) low-cost holiday site. It was launched in Feb 2003 just as the Iraq war got underway and is now being re-launched in July 03. You can book and pay for budget holidays online (it's £10pp less than using their call centre) and you pay extra for 'extras' like inflight meals & transfers. | ||||
| CheaperHolidays.com | Independent and family run travel company primarily offering last minute holidays from the main UK tour operators (both long & short haul) and charter flights, departing over the next 90 days. | ||||
| CheapFlights | Cheapflights is not an agency itself. It searches out and lists the best value flights, holidays & short breaks and you buy direct from the supplier. When it first started (1996) it just dealt in low fares from a small list of airline discount shops, but now it has grown into one of the most popular travel sites in the UK, with a comprehensive range of holidays & airlines from over 500 travel companies and they are now launching a sister site in the USA. In June 03 they added direct online flight booking through a choice of airline reservation systems. They now have a number of spin-off sites for accommodation, holidays, and shortbreaks. | ||||
| CheapOnline Flights.com | Launched in March 2002 by QP Travel, a Hull-based travel agency which has been in business since 1978. Reservations for discount flights and holidays departing from the UK. Flight bookings are handled by the Travel Select 'engine'. | ||||
| City Vacations | Website with city break offers. Part of Acetrip Ltd and a sister site to Eurobookers.com. | ||||
| CulturaTrips.com | Simple to use site combining flights, accommodation, car hire, etc, in a shopping basket. It's 'start from a blank sheet' approach only works for those who know exactly what they are looking for. Some things are in development and need to be sorted on the phone. | ||||
| Deckchair.com | Originally launched in Spring 1999 by Sir Bob Geldof as a simple-to-use online flight agency. Embarrassingly it failed to work on the launch day (I was there - Ed) but since then it went from strength to strength with over 410,000 registered users in June 2003. In March 01 it was sold to World Travel Holdings, and in June 2003 it was gobbled up by OTC. The site is simple to use and offers a huge range of flights, accommodation, car hire, short breaks, etc. | ||||
| Dialaflight.com | Mostly a 'department store' site offering hotels, villas and car hire through partner sites, but they have a database of flights and bargain holidays which is refreshingly easy to search and browse. Booking are then handle by phone. | ||||
| ebookers | Who hasn't heard of eBookers? Started out as the flight-orientated online service of the fares consolidator, Flightbookers, but is now a true 'travel portal' where you can search for everything from country cottages to cruises, train tickets to transfers. ebookers also owns the Travelbag (Australia specialists) and Bridge The World brands. In Dec 04 it, in turn, was aquired by the American Cendant group, which owns a number of travel brands such as Avis, Budget, Ramada and Travelodge. | ||||
| eDreams | Launched in March 99 (originally based in the USA) this is a 'department store' site with different suppliers selling different components: flights by Travelocity, villas & apartments by Interhome, ski holidays by Iglu.com, car hire by a selection of car rental companies including Avis. They still have a flowery mission statement but they've drifted slightly from their early efforts to specialise in unusual hard-to-find holidays with practical help from 400 'DreamGuides' - online travel experts who would answer specific queries about where to go and what to do by email. | ||||
| EnRoute | Small independent agency offering a variety of holidays, mostly in Europe and bookable online. | ||||
| Eurobookers.com | Mainly city breaks and late-availability. There's a database of offers, when you select one you are given a booking form to fill in. The transaction is done offline. Sister site to CityVacations.co.uk, part of Acetrip | ||||
| EuroDestination.com | Independent swansea-based online agency specialising in European short-breaks by air (scheduled & charter), by Eurostar, and self-drive by ferry. Sells tickets, holidays, insurance, & car parking. | ||||
| EurostarHols.com | City breaks via Eurostar. Part of Delpech Travel, so a sister brand to seafranceholidays.com, ferrydiscounts.com and shortbreakmarket.co.uk. | ||||
| Expedia | The first major eAgency, launched by Microsoft in the US in the early 90's, then in the UK & Europe a couple of years later. It is amazingly comprehensive (published and discounted fares on over 450 airlines, a directory of 40,000 hotels worldwide, car hire from more than 40 rental companies and a choice of 75,000 package holidays) and versatile. Expedia's 'Flight+' system allows you to build packages easily, and for holidays in the USA they've recently added over 4,500 extras ranging from theme parks and rounds of golf to magic shows and helicopter rides. | ||||
| Farebase | Farebase is an Information Service provider for travel agents. They do not take the booking, they let you search the database for scheduled & charter fares and then point you to one of their client agents to handle the booking. They also have late availability holidays and accommodation through hotelguide.com | ||||
| FirstResort.com | Launched in 2000 and part-owned by Thomson Holidays but doesn't feature their packages exclusively, it covers all their competitors too (Airtours, JMC, First Choice, etc). The focus of the site is selling a large range of mass-market major brand package holidays often at 'exclusive offer' rates. They claim to have a state-of-the-art search engine which "gives you direct access to the same information as a high street travel agent without having to leave the house!" | ||||
| Fleetway Travel | Online flight and hotel combinations (powered by Telme.com) with a telesales option through home-worker travel consultants. | ||||
| FlyNow.com | Started in 1989 as 'Travel Bug'. Changed the name to FlyNow in May 2000. It ceased trading on 15 Oct 01, but has now been resurrected as a trading name of Travelmood Ltd. A welcome return since it was, and continues to be, a simple-to-use independent travel site offering good value. | ||||
| Free2.co.uk | Freedom Travel Group online, specialising in long haul luxury holidays to the Middle East, Caribbean, Far East and Indian Ocean. | ||||
| Global Holidays | Independent Leeds-based travel agency selling flights & holidays from over 300 airlines & tour operators, plus car hire, hotels & travel insurance. You can buy some components online, otherwise through telesales. One unusual facility on the site is a section dedicated to streaming travel videos. | ||||
| Go-NowTravel.com | Page & Moy are a long-established worldwide travel operator and agency. This is their online agency. A busy site well-stocked with good, up-to-date holiday and travel offers from a range of reputable mainstream companies. The best thing about it is its clarity and ease-of-use. It is simple to find what you want (that's unusual) by menu or search form. You are presented with relevant products, clear information about who is offering them, and what benefit you get by buying through Go-NowTravel.com. The range of late availability deals is huge - up to 2,000,000 at any one time, and most of them are with named accommodation (which is also unusual). | ||||
| Holiday.co.uk | A site run by Digital Travel Services which is a subsiduary of a travel technology company called Comtec. It offers year-round holidays and late deals from major operators like Airtours, Argo, Avro, Balkan, Club 18-30, Cosmos, Crystal, First Choice, Globespan, Hayes & Jarvis, Inspiration, InterSky, JMC, Kosmar, Manos, Neilson, Odyssey, Panorama, Priceright, Sovereign, Style, Sunquest, Sunset, Sunworld, Thomson, Twenties, Unijet, and Virgin. You find the basic package you want and then phone their call centre in Wales (run by Holiday Express) to sort out the details and make the booking. Flights and ferries can be booked online. | ||||
| Holidays2GO | Launched in June 2003, H2G is a 'shop window' site for specialist and mainstream tours operators' distressed stock. At launch it is particularly strong on city breaks but the portfolio is expected to quickly expand into all areas. Also, Holidays2GO is the launch website in a 2GO brand series. They will be following up with Villas2GO, Flights2GO, Hotels2GO and Cars2GO. | ||||
| Holiday Superstore | This is the online shopfront for Barrhead Travel, a well-known Glasgow-based independent agency that has won a number of awards (2001/2002). It is well laid out and easy to follow. The search system for holidays and offers is sophisticated and quick. The site is biased towards departures from Scottish airports. | ||||
| ifyoutravel.com | ifyoutravel.com was launched in the UK, France, Germany and Scandinavia in Sept 2000, by the team behind complete-skier.com. It was the master site for a herd of spin-off niche sites such as ifyoudive.com, ifyougolf.com, ifyouski.com and ifyouexplore.com. More recently (Oct 2001), the group was aquired by the Online Travel Corporation and now this site is simply a referral site to the others. | ||||
| Iglu | Iglu started life as a specialist ski web site selling ski accommodation, but has now diversified into several niche site: igluSki.com, igluVillas.com, igluTropical.com & igluCities.com, all accessible from the main iglu.com site. There used to be an igluActive.com too, selling activity breaks, but that seems to have disappeared. | ||||
| Impulse Holidays | Online low-cost city break brand from TUI (parent company to Thomsons Holidays) | ||||
| Just | AKA Thomson Holidays online. Simple to use site offering online booking for "no-frills" holidays packages, meaning that non-essentials and pricing complications such as under-occupancy supplements, airport-transfers, meals on short-haul flights and the services of holiday reps are removed. You can select by destination, type or price and booking is now online (it had to be booked by phone before). | ||||
| JustTheTicket | Discount airfares, Car Hire, Hotels, Eurotunnel, Eurostar, Fly-Drive, city breaks and late holiday deals. Search online, then book on the phone. | ||||
| LastMinute.com | Famous home of late-availability holidays. If you are looking for excellent bargains and really can drop everything and go at a moment's notice, this is the place to look. They used to concentrate on flight deals but they've now expanded the accommodation offers as well. Lastminute also operates all the Online Travel Corporation (OTC) brands, see below. | ||||
| Latedeals.com | Latedeals claims to be the most visited dedicated late availability site and 17th most visited online travel agency in the UK. Bookings are taken offline at their call centre. | ||||
| Magic Breaks | Magic Breaks is an award-winning call-centre based travel agency. They used to specialise in travel and holiday clubs for brands like Goldfish, but there is now more emphasis on mainstream resort holidays, cruises, lakes & mountain holidays and city breaks. | ||||
| Mercury Direct | A 'mix & match' selection of flights & resorts on Malta, Cyprus, Australia, Mauritius, Madeira, Sri Lanka and South Africa. | ||||
| opodo | This is the online travel company created by nine European airlines - Aer Lingus, Air France, Alitalia, Austrian Airlines, British Airways, Finnair, Iberia, KLM and Lufthansa. The site offers not just cheap airfares but also hotels car hire and package holidays from operators such as Kuoni. If you are wondering about the name; they needed something that worked in up to nine different languages and for nine different cultures. It is also a visual palindrome. Turn it upside down and it looks the same. |
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| OTC - Online Travel Corporation | OTC, Online Travel Corporation was the top dog/head honcho in the UK online travel market. It was launched in January 1998 and has been quietly expanding since by buying up other online agencies such as A2Btravel.com, 1ski.com, Boardit.com, Bargainholidays.com, Ferrybooker.com, the IfYouTravel.com group, and in June 03, Deckchair.com and leisureHunt.com. It has over 12 own-brand consumer websites and 60 'white-label' travel sites. However, as Qui-Gon Jinn puts it: "there's always a bigger fish", and more recently OTC was gobbled up by lastminute.com. The OTC (OnlineTravel.com) site is a "full-service travel shop" for leisure and business travellers, selling flights, hotels, car hire, Eurotunnel, ferries, holidays from mainstream tour operators (up to 12% off brochure price), and their own package holidays ranging from city breaks in Europe to all-inclusive resorts in the Caribbean. Bookings can be made online or by phone. |
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| Priceline.co.uk | Priceline's business model is based on its Name Your Own Price system which allows you nominate the price you would like to pay for a hotel, flight or car rental and it then searches its database of partner companies looking for unsold seats, rooms or cars that they are willing to sell at that price. While that system still applies to hotel rooms, we can't see much evidence of it being applied to flights and cars, which seem to be sourced the traditional way, powered by their parent company OnlineTravel.com (OTC) for flights and Holiday Autos for cars. Priceline.co.uk has just (Feb 2006) undergone a facelift and introduced some new features. The site now displays over 11,000 hotels across Europe that can be booked independently of the NYOP system. And they've also introduced a review system called PillowTalk – a ‘word cloud’ that displays words of different sizes according to how many times they have been mentioned by customer reviews. These words are taken from over 300,000 reviews submitted by genuine guests who have booked and stayed at a hotel through Priceline. | ||||
| Reader Offers Ltd | RolHolidays offers European coach holidays, European (mostly) city breaks, Holidays in the USA (especially Florida), and cruises (especially Cunard) from this site. | ||||
| Teletext | The old workhorse of electronic distribution (remember those dreadful block graphics on your telly?) has a fast-moving stylish site with plenty of bargain holidays, flights, cruises, ski holidays and ferrys crossings on offer. | ||||
| Telme Global Traveller | A well-constructed site, simple to use. It used to be biased towards the business traveller market with the emphasis on flights, hotels & car hire, but now it offers plenty of holiday bargains and specialist packages such as cruising, honeymoons and sports tours. | ||||
| TheWorld IsYourOyster.com | Online brand for 21st Century Travel Ltd, a (non-ABTA) agency selling 'white-labelled' holiday packages (holidays from un-identified tour operators) to a wide range of destinations worldwide plus coach tours UK destinations. | ||||
| ThisIsTravel | Travel portal launched at the start of 2002 by the Mail, Mail on Sunday, Evening Standard, and Metro group of newspapers. Most of the content (such as Frank Barrett's advice column) seems to be culled from their existing travel pages online. A flights/insurance/hotels/car-hire booking engine turns the site into a 'portal'. | ||||
| Thomas Cook | Needs no introduction. One of the best known names in the travel business, even though it has rebranded its tour operations as JMC. You can search for and book, flights, holidays, car hire, insurance, and foreign currency. Many of the mainstream operators' are featured (remember TC is an agency, where JMC is the operator) among the sun, ski, cruise and 'faraway' holidays. | ||||
| Travel4less.co.uk | The online division of the Destination Group which was bought by LastMinute.com on June 2002. It offers tailor-made city breaks & holidays with bargain priced flights, car hire, & hotels worldwide. | ||||
| TravelBargains.co.uk | Package holidays, flights, hotels, ski packages, cruises, etc all searcheable by date & type but then booked by phone. | ||||
| TravelCare.co.uk | The online manifestation of Co-op's Travelcare chain, the UK's largest independent travel agent. It works very well, allowing you to easily browse for late offers or holiday destinations. There's also a good selection of travel extras available, such as airport parking, travel insurance, airport hotels, and gift vouchers. And it offers a specialised sports break service for horse-racing, football, golf & tennis enthusiasts. | ||||
| Travelocity | Back in the early 1970s a smart guy (called Max Hopper) working for American Airlines realised that there was no reason why travel agents couldn't key in reservations themselves if they were connected to the same computer the AA reservations dept used. Thus started SABRE, the first Computer Reservation System. It is now used globally by hundreds of thousands of travel agents booking flights, hotels and cars from all the major companies. Travelocity is SABRE on the internet, essentially the same system the professionals use. The UK version of Travelocity (travelocity.co.uk) has been running since 1998. Holidays appear to be sourced through the Go Now database, IE Page & Moy. | ||||
| TravelPlanners | A division of USAirtours group, selling flights, accommodation, car hire, airport parking, short breaks and holidays. | ||||
| Travelselect.com | Travelselect.com is a business (mostly) & leisure travel site aimed at small companies and individuals. It evolved from a ticket consolidator called Globepost back in 1999 and is now part of Lastminute.com. It offers flights, hotels, holidays and car rental plus an online booking facility for Eurostar. | ||||
| travelstore.com | Started out July 99 as Eclipsis.com but quickly changed its name to Travelstore. The first eAgency to be accepted into the ranks of ABTA. In February 2000 it bought out one of its main competitors, Equator-net, and in June 2002, it in turn was aquired by the Online Travel Corporation. It is now aimed firmly at business travellers and frequent flyers who are typically self-employed or work for small to medium sized enterprises, offering flights rooms car hire and other travel components coupled with sophisticated corporate travel management systems and facilities. | ||||
| Travel supermarket.com | Launched in the summer 03 by the company behind Moneysupermarket.com, on which it is modelled. Travelsupermarket is not really a supermarket at all, its an index to other shops. Like the specialist farecheckers (see farecheckers) they automatically 'spider' or 'scrape' fare databases and travel company websites to come up with a comparison report of best prices. You make a selection and you are handed over to that company to make the booking. Travelsupermarket pocket the introduction fee. | ||||
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| Research Tips: | * Not all online agencies complete the booking online. Many use a mainstream computer reservations system for booking & payment on flights, but rely on email forms and/or call centres to handle more complex travel components. |
| * One thing to look for: all online flight booking systems can easily sell 'city pair' flights (return tickets from city A to city B), the thing that technologically sorts the men from the boys is their ability to handle multi-leg itineraries. | |
| * See also Online Accommodation-only Agencies | |
| * See also Online Specialist Agencies |
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