Agoda Flights Review

Overview

Agoda is a relatively new player to the flights game, having been in the hotel industry for a number of years. As such, their flight offering reflects this. While the layout is simple and clean, it’s missing some basic functionality to be a fully competitive offering. Having said that, flight prices always vary from site to site so it’s still worth checking them out if you’re after the cheapest price.

Features

Agoda offers both one-way and return flights, however it doesn’t offer any more advanced features like multi-stop or open jaw flights. While is interface is slick and easy to use, it only offers the option to search for “passengers” i.e. you can’t search for children’s prices. If you’re travelling as a family this might cost your dearly, but won’t make a difference if traveling as a couple or on business. One great option that is visible on many flights is seat selection, as this can be done prior to making your booking, whereas with many other competitors you can only do it afterwards – this of course is airline dependent. One massive disadvantage to booking flights on Agoda is that from our testing, they don’t display any useful information at all about baggage and change and cancellation fees – simply directing you to the airline’s websites. Without this kind of useful information, you’re probably better of just booking with the airline’s directly.

For return flights, Agoda will package the departure and return flights together. While this makes it easy to select flight, it typically doesn’t give you as many options as selecting them separately. While the basic filters all work fine, there are no options to filter by transfer city, or airline alliance. The price calendar feature at the top of the search results is a nice touch, but we found that it’s missing a lot of prices which makes it not particularly useful. Unlike the main competitors, Agoda doesn’t provide any information about the plane apart from the model, so there’s no way to find out if the flight has Wi-fi or how wide the seats are, for example. We found that Agoda’s search works fairly well, supporting cities, states and countries. It doesn’t support searching by attraction, however we suspect that is not particularly useful to most people anyway.

Pricing & Fees

From our testing we found that Agoda’s flight prices were reasonably competitive but they definitely weren’t the leader. Given the little information about changes, cancellation fees and baggage however, it makes this an extremely difficult thing to do an apples-to-apples comparison. As with most of the other competitors, Agoda don’t charge any booking or credit card fees for flights.

Availability

Generally speaking, the range of flights offered on the app appears to be good. One caveat however is that Agoda automatically matches appropriate Inbound and Outbound pairs. While this can make the booking process simpler it also often leads to a small amount of combinations which can be booked.

Accessibility

Flights are available on all three of Agoda’s platforms, Desktop, Mobile and the mobile app available on both iOS and Android. These platforms are all available in around 39 languages at the time of publication.

Payment Methods

At the stage, Agoda appears to only be accepting credit card and debit card payment for flights, with Visa, Mastercard and American Express being the only options.

Reputation

Agoda has a strong reputation for hotels, but is relatively unknown for flights. With it’s parent company as Booking Holdings, we can assume that they are a reliable service, but we’re yet to hear from their users when it comes to flights.

Customer Service

Agoda offers telephone support (via local phone numbers), online chat via their app as well as email support. Hoever they don’t make most of these options easy to find – usually you’ll have to click a “Show more options” link in the help section. Unfortunately for flights, it appears that at the moment, only phone support is available. Hopefully Agoda will increase these options with time.

Summary

Being such a new player in the flights game, Agoda is probably not at the top of anybody’s list at the moment, however the company has proven it can innovate before, so this is definitely a company to keep an eye on. If you’re making a simple booking for adults where you’re already familiar with the booking policies, it might be worth checking them out.