Expedia – the world’s largest travel agent, and a site I used a lot, err, last century, has finally arrived in New Zealand. Here’s a quick review.
That’s a mere 11 years after being founded by Microsoft in 1996 – nice to know we are important. It’s a classic case of the big boys discounting our small market, and allowing the likes of House of Travel and th airlines to take the market.
Anyway – is it worthwhile using Expedia.co.nz?
Well – for internal flights it looks like Expedia does better than the airline sites:
versus AirNZ:
plus
That’s $178 from the airline combo, and $145.91 from Expedia. Impressive. Very impressive – are Expedia operating on loss-leader margins?
But what about House of Travel (I hear you ask). It’s not a site I use, so I ran the same test.
On the one hand I got a cheapest fare of $157. (Less than Q+AirNZ, more than the $145 of Expedia).
On the other, actually choosing the same flights though gave me the same price as the airlines.
and on the other other hand – hitting Continue killed the process. (each time)
So – back to Expedia. As we could guess, the site is still very much skewed to the US traveller:
She’s not from here
Those aren’t our top hotel destinations
We don’t care about Honolulu (not at $2227)
Those aren’t our top rental car destinations.
So Expedia seems to lump us with Hawaii in some sort of ‘US South Pacific’, but hopefully the site will be tweaked as use becomes clear.
Overall – I fully expected the site to be totally US centric, and it is, but I certainly did not expect the cheaper fares that we see here. It’s a very interesting entrant to NZ market.
Yay for cheap prices from Expedia!
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Good to have more competition in the market. Doesn’t matter it’s good or bad (better to be good), more is better!!
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Actually Air NZ Guarantees the cheapest prices for Air NZ tickets online. If Expedia is cheaper for the same ticket then Air NZ will match it.
In saying that I’m glad Expedia is here. Their booking engine is pretty good and being able to manage trips and save things is pretty good.
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My travel agent could not find let alone match the airfares Expedia quoted. Super low. The web site is user friendly and the booking staff on the end of the telephone were very efficient. I would recommend this company, I will only be booking my hotels, flights through them in the future. Well done…….
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Well yes it is always good and healthy to have competition
in any field,
There for we the consumer’s will benefit from the cheap fare deals and packages offered by Airlines.
Holiday flight’s are now in reach for most people due to these type of packages you Expedia are offering, which was hard to do previously if you wanted to take the family along too.
I am one of these people that watch grab a seat and that
certainly has taken off.
Go Expedia more people are travelling now than ever before.
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Just used the site to book my US trip.
It’s so easy, and I’ve spent hours looking on other sites and visiting other travel agents. Expedia.co.nz is the best.
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