All of these discount airline ticket websites offer more than just cheap flights. You can get deals on cruises, luggage, car rentals, hotel rooms and more. But for the purpose of this comparison, we are going to focus on getting the best deal on an airline ticket - which makes is fairly easy to compare these websites. All we had to do was choose a date and a destination, and find out which site had the best deal on flights. We repeated this with different dates and destinations to ensure that it wasn't just a fluke, and found that some of websites just have better deals than others...

The flight we compare is a round-trip ticket from Denver (DIY) to Chicago (Midway) booked one month in advanced for a week-long stay. We weren't picky about times and just used the price from the cheapest flight available.

Expedia found us tickets on an early evening flight for $156.40 round-trip. There were no layovers and the flight was about two and a half hours each way on Frontier Airlines.

Cheap Tickets found a round-trip morning flight for $155, also on Frontier Airlines with no layovers. This flight also goes to Chicago's Midway airport.

Orbitz, which looks like it uses the same software as CheapTickets.com to find flights and prices, ended up finding the same flight, but it was $1 more ($156) for some reason.


Priceline could not find a single flight, even when we tried the day before and the day after. Rather than not give any data at all, we tried a week later. After waiting about ten minutes, the site finally came up with a non-stop on Frontier (the exact same flight as the two above) for $151.

Because all four discount airline ticket websites came up with the same airline for about the same price, we decided to go one step further and see what Frontier would charge if you skipped the middle-man and went directly through their website. The price: $151.40.

So what have we learned? Having flown a few dozen times over the last couple of years, we found what we pretty much already knew - those cheap ticket websites are mostly marketing ploys. Everyone has access to the same flights for about the same price. They make you think you're getting a good deal on the ticket, but you're really not saving that much, if anything. The good news is they don't mark up the tickets like most resellers would, but they make up for that by hitting you with every type of upsell in the book.

For what it's worth, Last Minute Travel did have better deals when we booked less than a week in advance - thus living up to their name. Either way, it doesn't hurt to spend an extra ten or fifteen minutes looking at all the different options. Who knows, you might find a deal after all...