The British online travel agency Opodo also has a considerable market presence in the world. Unlike many flight search engines, which compare offers from numerous portals, Opodo sells flight tickets as a travel agency itself. In our test, we take a look at how recommendable flight search and ticket purchasing are at the travel portal.
Review
With useless additional packages and excessively high fees, Opodo has the same serious problems that we find fault with other online travel agencies. Once again, it’s best to book flights directly with the airline. If you want to compare prices beforehand in the search, it’s better to use one of the so-called meta-search engines, which we present in more detail in our comparison of flight search engines.
What we liked
- Good design
- Acceptable payment methods
What we did not like
- Useless additional services
- Fees higher than those charged by the airline itself
In addition to airline tickets, Opodo sells package tours, combined flight and hotel bookings, and rental cars. As is typical for such portals, the focus is always on advertising unusual bargains and “cheap flights“. Especially in the flight segment, however, Opodo sells tickets of all airlines from budget to premium. Let’s take a closer look at the offer.
Read more: Google Flights Review
The fancy website with flaws
In addition to return and one-way flights, Opodo allows fork stop searches with a maximum of four segments. Once all entries are made, the search duration turns out to be quite long, even for simple one-way searches. Sometimes the search fails because of “expired sessions”, but we initiated them only at the previous moment. Graphically, the website presents search results in an appealing and coherent way. The usual filters for flight times, airports, transfers, etc. are available. It is possible to select specific airlines, but filtering by airline alliances is missing.
Like so many portals of this kind, Opodo charges payment fees for many payment methods. The “cheapest” payment method is always present by default, but the corresponding filter, which can be used to display prices for credit card payments, is unfortunately hidden in the bottom corner of the website.
The display of the search results can convince us graphically overall. However, the recommendation of the “best flight”, which is prominently highlighted and, in our opinion, too often at least does not correspond to the best price-performance ratio, does not seem to make sense at all times. We encounter more serious problems elsewhere.
Dubious fees
While prices advertised in the search results initially correspond to those of associated airlines, Opodo surprises us in the booking process with sometimes hair-raising additional fees. On the one hand, these result from the mostly useless service packages typical for online travel agencies, but in the test also from horrendous baggage fees.
Our example connection is with Lufthansa from Dresden to Moscow. Since it is not an intercontinental flight, no checked baggage is included. The manual add-on booking costs 25 euros on the Lufthansa website, but 42.64 euros at Opodo. For only 20 euros, Lufthansa also offers the choice of a higher economy service class including free baggage allowance, while Opodo offers no such option. Such gross errors should not happen – certainly not in the case of an established airline.
Let’s move on to the additional Opodo service packages. Here, the service can argue with Fluege.de about who sells the cheekier offers. Misleadingly for a few fliers, Opodo advertises, for example, the elimination of rebooking fees when buying the additional package. In fact, however, only Opodo fees are waived by the additional payment: costs incurred by the airline remain unaffected. Consequently, anyone who books directly with the airline enjoys exactly the same service, but without having to pay additional money to the travel agency.
Other services that are standard in the industry when booking directly with airlines, such as mobile boarding passes or SMS messages in the event of flight changes, are also sold as chargeable “premium” services. If you would like to find out more about additional services, insurance packages, etc., you can do so in our comparison of flight search engines.
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Payment fees
Depending on the selected payment method, Opodo may charge additional fees. In particular, this applies to payment by credit and debit cards as well as PayPal. Those who opt for payments via Klarna or Giropay do not pay anything extra. Apart from the hidden payment filter in the search results, this is thus a largely fair payment system.
Opodo: The best alternatives
Doesn’t suit you? Are you looking for suitable alternatives? Below you will find the best Opodo alternatives.
We also recommend that you take a look at our flight search engine best lists. You can find comparable products in the best list “The five best flight search engines: On these portals, you book the cheapest”.
Opodo: Datasheet
Here you can find the technical data of Opodo. Size, weight, and other characteristics can be easily compared with other products.
- Multistop search ✔ Yes
- Flexible data ✘ No
- Flexible destinations ✘ No
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