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I mostly travel with StarAlliance - SAS since its offers fit my business needs the best. I have been using the Skyscanner website, but yesterday, I bought my ticket directly from the SAS website.

I noticed that the ticket I bought on the SAS website was four euros more expensive than the tickets I normally buy from Skyscanner. Shouldn't it be cheaper to buy the ticket from the airline company directly?

I travel mostly in Nordic countries.

mindcorrosive
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Léo Léopold Hertz 준영
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    Short answer: Don't expect any logic whatsoever in airline ticket prices :) – Lagerbaer Apr 17 '13 at 20:36
  • actually this is not only limited to airlines, may other businesses have lower prices when accessing from aggregator sites. Logic behind it is that if someone uses aggregator site, he's not decided on airline yet. And obviously lower the price, higher in the search. Sometimes $5 can make difference between result #1 and result #20. – vartec Apr 18 '13 at 14:16

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Skyscanner may have an agreement with the airline that allows it to sell tickets at a minor discount in exchange for providing the airline with a certain number of customers or certain level of revenue.

Or, and this is pure conjecture on my part, Skyscanner could sell some tickets at less profit than they either make up the decreased profit on other tickets that may be more expensive or through revenue from complimentary services, e.g. hotel bookings. The airline probably follows a similar strategy, but the formula they use to determine their version of this strategy may be a little different from the one used by Skyscanner, which is why some tickets (e.g. the ones you happen to be buying) are priced differently at each business.

John Bensin
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  • I suspect hotels are the same way. It's almost always cheaper to book through a hotels.com, expedia.com, etc than through the hotel directly. – Danger14 Jan 16 '15 at 17:29