Does anyone here have any experience with Opodo?

Racxie

As per the title. I'm looking to book flights with RyanAir for a group including myself and Opodo has consistently come up a lot cheaper compared to any other site. I almost ended up purchasing tickets through them before seeing there was an offer to get some money off if you used their app. So I downloaded the app, but the app experience was abysmal due to it being pretty broken.

That made me question the legitimacy of it, so I looked up the app reviews and a lot of people are warning against using Opodo. TrustPilot was the same. I also found an article by RyanAir warning against using sites such as Opodo and LastMinute.com to book tickets (which of course they would), but I've found similarly poor ratings for other sites such as MyTrip.com and LastMinute.com on TrustPilot.

Are all these bad reviews just the vocal minority? Or have money savers here had success? I would of course like to save as much as possible but not at the cost of poor customer service & issues especially with something important as this. If yes then are there any other sites such people would suggest to avoid? (e.g. MyTrip and LastMinute.com).

Westin

The cheapest available tickets on RyanAir will be buying direct from the airline at www.RyanAir.com.

There will either be no seats with Opodo at the advertised price, a missed charge or fee discovered later in the booking path - or a charge if you want anything post booking (like a boarding pass).

Please do not put yourself through this pain.

Racxie

Westin said:

The cheapest available tickets on RyanAir will be buying direct from the airline at www.RyanAir.com.

There will either be no seats with Opodo at the advertised price, a missed charge or fee discovered later in the booking path - or a charge if you want anything post booking (like a boarding pass).

Please do not put yourself through this pain.

If they're really this bad then how have they survived this long? Surely there must be people who've had success with them? Or is it just RyanAir that causes a problem with sites such as Opodo? The massive saving is just so tempting 

Caz3121

Racxie said:

 The massive saving is just so tempting 

they don't have live pricing and availability. You make a booking request then, usually within 48 hours they will find out and advise if they can purchase the tickets for you at their advertised price. Given that they still need to go to the Ryanair website and purchase tickets and you say the saving is massive, I would think it pretty certain they will come back and advise they cannot supply the tickets unless you pay £x more. You can then of course decline at the real price and wait weeks/months/involve your card company to get your money back.
Ryanair sells tickets in batches of fares and it is common for all seats in one booking to be at the same fare, you may find it better to break down your booking into multiple
eg if Ryanair has 6 seats left at £50 and the next fare is £80, if you ask for 8 seats it will calculate 8 seats @ £80 = £640
If you make a booking for 6 and then another booking for 2, you would pay 6 x £50 + 2 x £80 = £460
needs some playing about on the site but I would not go via any third party for Ryanair flights.

Racxie

Caz3121 said:

Racxie said:

 The massive saving is just so tempting 

they don't have live pricing and availability. You make a booking request then, usually within 48 hours they will find out and advise if they can purchase the tickets for you at their advertised price. Given that they still need to go to the Ryanair website and purchase tickets and you say the saving is massive, I would think it pretty certain they will come back and advise they cannot supply the tickets unless you pay £x more. You can then of course decline at the real price and wait weeks/months/involve your card company to get your money back.
Ryanair sells tickets in batches of fares and it is common for all seats in one booking to be at the same fare, you may find it better to break down your booking into multiple
eg if Ryanair has 6 seats left at £50 and the next fare is £80, if you ask for 8 seats it will calculate 8 seats @ £80 = £640
If you make a booking for 6 and then another booking for 2, you would pay 6 x £50 + 2 x £80 = £460
needs some playing about on the site but I would not go via any third party for Ryanair flights.

I did check Ryanair's website too so I know there's definitely enough seats available, and Opodo even seemed to acknowledge that I couldn't book a check-in hand luggage which is what Ryanair's website said too (for some reason we can on the way there, just not on the way back), so it seemed to be pretty accurate.

I'm still wondering what the success rate is with them and other companies like lastminute.com - after all it still begs the question how they would survive this long if no one managed to have any luck with them.

Westin

Good luck then. Please report back on your saving.

Caz3121

Racxie said:

I did check Ryanair's website too so I know there's definitely enough seats available, and Opodo even seemed to acknowledge that I couldn't book a check-in hand luggage which is what Ryanair's website said too (for some reason we can on the way there, just not on the way back), so it seemed to be pretty accurate.

I'm still wondering what the success rate is with them and other companies like lastminute.com - after all it still begs the question how they would survive this long if no one managed to have any luck with them.

when you check the price on the Ryanair website for 1 passenger, does this price multiplied by the number of passengers agree to what you see when you check for your full party?
Not having live pricing is the key issue, flight prices can change frequently. You would only be submitting a request, not making a booking.
There will be customers that get successful bookings following a request, this may be that the price they display is similar to the airline price (they know some people will just randomly select the cheapest even if that saving is only £5-£10...they are happy to take the hit on that £5-£10 as they will likely make more than that amount from the customer with their additional fees.
Have a look at the Opodo threads on the Air Travel forum on TripAdvisor and understand that with Ryanair they will not sell their flights any cheaper to third parties so Opodo will need to pay the price advertised to buy the flights from them.

Racxie

Caz3121 said:

Racxie said:

I did check Ryanair's website too so I know there's definitely enough seats available, and Opodo even seemed to acknowledge that I couldn't book a check-in hand luggage which is what Ryanair's website said too (for some reason we can on the way there, just not on the way back), so it seemed to be pretty accurate.

I'm still wondering what the success rate is with them and other companies like lastminute.com - after all it still begs the question how they would survive this long if no one managed to have any luck with them.

when you check the price on the Ryanair website for 1 passenger, does this price multiplied by the number of passengers agree to what you see when you check for your full party?
Not having live pricing is the key issue, flight prices can change frequently. You would only be submitting a request, not making a booking.
There will be customers that get successful bookings following a request, this may be that the price they display is similar to the airline price (they know some people will just randomly select the cheapest even if that saving is only £5-£10...they are happy to take the hit on that £5-£10 as they will likely make more than that amount from the customer with their additional fees.
Have a look at the Opodo threads on the Air Travel forum on TripAdvisor and understand that with Ryanair they will not sell their flights any cheaper to third parties so Opodo will need to pay the price advertised to buy the flights from them.

Yes, the displayed on the desktop site was correct & matched the number of passengers etc. - that wasn't the case with the app though... when I'd add some of the luggage options on, it would tell me what the luggage option would cost but wouldn't show it in the total price, so it still kept telling me I'd only have to pay less despite even including the luggage in my basket details. Taht's the point where I realised something was off and started looking into it.

And yeah, I noticed they want to charge extra for pretty much everything, including just texting you the details! Of course I was just saying no to all of that  I'm guessing based on that at least that they probably must make money off a lot of people selling extras, while possibly losing money on the odd person like me.

Still haven't gone through with it though, but I'll check those sites out. Thanks!