Big debate going on about metasearch and travel. Or, to put it another way, who does the best “gocompare” for the travel business, or more specifically, flights. As a travel agent at the sharp end of travel, I am a little bemused by all the fuss.

Many of us in travel already know that if you want to book Easyjet, book Easyjet and if you simply want to go on Monday to Amsterdam and back on Tuesday, well, pretty much any old website will do. In addition, if I am going to Amsterdam at 0600 and back at 1700, then I do not need to metasearch anything – just getting a seat at any price would be nice.

Things are a tad different long and medium haul, of course – so does having a gocompare facility help here? Not really. Generally speaking, if you ask any website for a ticket from Here to There, any website will tell you. If you look at 24 websites or 124 websites you may find that the price goes up (a bit) or down (a bit) but it will not differ significantly – unless, of course, the website you are looking at has its fares loaded incorrectly (which happens more often than you may think)

The thing about it, is that in travel, you either have a net fare contract (ie cheap or consolidated fares) or you don’t. If you have it, then that fare is pretty much the same and it matters not if you book online, or offline at a travel agency. You get nett fare plus about £30 or £40 – which is the average going rate, these days. The other thing to remember is that for any destination, there are a (very) finite number of seats and an even more finite number of seats going cheap. If you want to go from A to B and there is a trade fair on and a football match and, and, and…… and there are only three aeroplanes going there on the day in question, you can metasearch your way from here to Kingdom come – it will cost.

The other thing an agent can do – and no website can do – is work the wrinkles. This applies especially to complicated itineraries (ie anything with 3 sectors and above in them; excluding simple A to B that have to go via somewhere) Fares can change dramatically by changing how the itinereray is ticketed, they can change dramatically by making a single flight a return flight or even by including a flight you do not actually want to take. A good agent can think about what you are trying to do and may, by instinct, know how best to do it. The internet metasearch fails because it has answered your question -the trouble is, you have not asked the right question!

What I do rely on the web for (and, notably, Expedia is very good for this), are routings. If one cannot find a raft of nice, consolidated fares for getting from A to B then very often I cheat. Expedia has a very good grasp of routings as well as being the most accurate site I know (along with Travelocity) for having fares correctly loaded. Actually, that is another reason why websites can be totally misleading. Any site (and so, indirectly, metasearch) relies on having the right building blocks to start with. If the fares and the fare rules are incorrectly loaded, then garbage in, garbage out applies. True, you can just book it and let the website carry the can – but if the fare is, in fact, invalid, you may be turned away by the airline at the airport or be asked for a lot more money. I am not going to tell you who is the worst as I do not wish to receive any cunningly worded invitations to visit a courtroom but trust me, there is one very big one out there that is rubbish on fares and hopeless on routings!

So maybe, just maybe, a visit to a good IATA travel agent could be the best course.