mobissimo.co.uk

Mobissimo is a newish service which allows you to search for airfares, hotels and car rentals. It has a few advantages over others I have tried.

No single site will consistently find the best deals every time. It's always worth checking several. However, Mobissimo has a huge advantage in that it searches sites worldwide. I have seen it come up with excellent fares on a site in Hong Kong for example.

My main beef (and ...
...prices default in US Dollars. This is easy to change on the results page. Simply choose the currency you want from a drop down menu, and the prices change instantly.

Searching is easy if basic. You enter the departure and destination cities or airport codes. If there is more than one possibility, you then choose from a drop down list. You enter dates (there is a calendar function), the number of tickets, class and whether you want ... more

Mobissimo is a newish service which allows you to search for airfares, hotels and car rentals. It has a few advantages over others I have tried.

No single site will consistently find the best deals every time. It's always worth checking several. However, Mobissimo has a huge advantage in that it searches sites worldwide. I have seen it come up with excellent fares on a site in Hong Kong for example.

My main beef (and it's a minor one) is that despite the co.uk domain, prices default in US Dollars. This is easy to change on the results page. Simply choose the currency you want from a drop down menu, and the prices change instantly.

Searching is easy if basic. You enter the departure and destination cities or airport codes. If there is more than one possibility, you then choose from a drop down list. You enter dates (there is a calendar function), the number of tickets, class and whether you want a roundtrip or single ticket. However, you can't search for packages, so if you are looking for flight and hotel or car rental as a single deal, you still have to slog through the various sites that offer that.

Hit search and within seconds, you get your first results. The page refreshes itself periodically until all the sites it searches have been queried.

The results page is well laid out. In the left column it lists the "provider", such as Expedia, Opodo or the airline itself. It also shows a little country identifier next to the name if it is not a US site. (Again, this relates to my earlier beef, in that this is basically an American site.) Still it is handy for highlighting which sites are British, and it is interesting to see what deals are available in other parts of the world. And even with exchange commission etc., you can sometimes get a better deal buying abroad.

The second column lists the airline, the third the price, and the fourth column is a link for "details", which takes you to whichever site is making the offer. A fifth button allows you to email the offer to yourself or a friend.

When you click to get details of the offer, Mobissimo opens a new window. You get a message such as "Thanks for trying Mobissimo! We're taking you directly to the Opodo Web site, based in Great Britain. The site is in English and charges in a foreign currency." (In other words, foreign to Americans.) You are then redirected to the search results on that website.

On the right of the website are the details you entered, which you can amend for a new search without going back to the main page.

Things work in much the same way for car rentals and hotels.

As a tool for quickly searching many sites, Mobissimo is invaluable, and its layout and ease of use are excellent. As a new site, I just hope they make the effort to customise the co.uk domain for British users.

 

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