> As far as I can tell, the major booking portals for tickets are all basically the same. I’ve been using Orbitz for a long time
This is really bad advice. You should search using a flight search engine like Google Flights, not a single OTA, and book directly with the airline unless an OTA has a much, much better deal. The $10 that Orbitz might sometimes save you comes at the cost of having to talk to their customer service, not the airline’s, if you want to change your trip.
I have heard it also puts you in a better position when an airline is bumping passengers or carry-on luggage, though the soft rules are always changing, so I don't know if this is still the case (or ever was.)
Depending on the region, you can get a pretty hefty payout for getting bumped, if you know what paperwork to file (even if they get you a hotel and later flight). Terrible if you have plans, not bad if you're backpacking like in my case.
This is also true of hotels. If the hotel is overbooked they will “walk” the third party booked people first and keep their reward members / first party booked people happy
Google Flights search is irredeemably broken for long international business-class flights, and I've tried a few times over the years to get someone there to give a shit, and they will not.
Example: You search for a flight from YWG to BKK in business, and it wants to route you YWG-YVR-KIX-BKK, which is basically fine. The flight time from YWG-YVR is under 3 hours, so it'll show you fares where that leg is in Economy, but YVR-KIX is in business, which is also, fundamentally, fine, although it would be nice to filter that. A short hop being Economy to get you on to the long leg in Business is usually acceptable. HOWEVER, it will ALSO show you fares where KIX-BKK (a 6 hour flight) are in Economy, and it won't allow you to filter this, so this messes up any ability to sensibly filter flights by price. If I am searching for a flight in Business, please allow me to filter out ones where *9 hours* of that flight is actually in Economy.</rant>
I imagine you could quickly build your own browser extension that parses all visible segments and hides cards where any individual leg exceeds your economy/business threshold. I successfully vibe coded a solution to a different Google flights problem in about 10 minutes.
They're all pretty much the same? Going from somewhere, to somewhere, at a date and time. Passenger info, payment info, book.
Every airline wants tech-incompetent grannies to buy their tickets, therefore the UI is simple enough that any HN reader should be able to trivially navigate it.
The airline websites that I've used are remarkably bad with their UI/UX. Far from any grandma being able to use it, definitely. I can rarely get through the process without some inexplicable error or missing field that I can't find or misbehaving custom date picker.
This is really bad advice. You should search using a flight search engine like Google Flights, not a single OTA, and book directly with the airline unless an OTA has a much, much better deal. The $10 that Orbitz might sometimes save you comes at the cost of having to talk to their customer service, not the airline’s, if you want to change your trip.