It’s really fairly simple: Momondo is a difficult name to remember and a search engine for flights.

We’re not a travel agency, we’re not an airline, we’re not a booking-portal and we do not sell flight tickets.

We just search fares across the web - exactly as you do, when hunting your next flight ticket. The only difference is that our robots can search hundreds of sites simultaneously - giving you an overview within seconds.

That’s why we made Momondo – to google for flights across sites.

Momondo is a new type of travel service on the web, also known as a “Travel Search Engine” (TSE).

Where to book your flight?

You can book your flight ticket directly on an airline-website or you can book your ticket on one of the many Online Travel Agencies (OTA’s).

Online Travel Agencies are just like normal travel agencies – they just sell their tickets on the Web. Expedia.com, Opodo.com, Travelocity.com and orbitz.com are some of the big international booking portals.

Each country and region has a large number of smaller players. In Denmark, for instance,  we have travelstart.dk, mrjet.dk, travelmarket.dk, flybillet.dk, rejsefeber.dk and goleif.dk.

Airlines are grouped in two: The “old” national carriers (like SAS, Lufthansa, British Airways) and the “new” low-cost or no-frills airlines (like EasyJet, Ryan Air, Sterling, Air Berlin)

Sometimes it’s best to book your flight directly from the airline; at other times you may get the cheapest fare via an Online Travel Agency - as they purchase in large volumes.

However Online Travel Agencies typically only offer flight tickets from national carriers and not from low-cost airlines :-(

This makes it time-consuming and difficult for consumers to track down the best fares – searching around on airline and travel agency sites - and that’s where TSE’s and Momondo come into the picture.

Momondo searches across travel agency sites, national carriers and low-cost airlines to present a consolidated view of the market place - we google for flights.

Our programmers are doing a great job.

Travel Search Engines are hard to build as their web-crawlers need to fill in information (say destination, departure dates etc) in order to access information (timetables and prices). Furthermore the crawlers need to understand the information in the same manner as humans in order to sort and transform them into compiled result-sets.

To our knowledge Momondo has the most complete coverage of low-cost airlines in Europe. Our programmers are doing a great job: Programming a bunch of robots that send trip-requests to airlines and agencies and grab the prices in order to present them for easy price comparison.

It’s free to use momondo - and if you value our service - send us your encouragement and love - and we will reply by continuously developing new features.

There are a number of other valuable resources similar to Momondo. US sites count Kayak, Sidestep and Mobissimo.  In Europe we have Skyscanner, Dohop and Travel Fusion as worth mentioning resources.

We hope this gives you a brief idea of the new players that are changing the game and making the travel market more transparent for consumers.

We are a small, but dedicated team. We will continue to develop leading-edge solutions in aggressive timeframes. And if you like travelling or have a passion for web-development, you’re most welcome to send us a mail and join the team.

Our mission is set: To be the starting point for any travel in Europe and beyond.

Enjoy your trip and go make Europe your town.

  
The Momondo Team

(You can view the list of airline and agency sites that we scan.  If you know about a low-cost airline that we are missing or a travel-portal worth including - please tell us by using our Feedback Form.)

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 18:50 and is filed under Frontpage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.