Big online travel agencies have the slowest flight search, even with fast sister sites

The slowest flight searches in our October 2026 speed test were the big online travel agencies, the sites where you book and pay. Priceline took 16.65 seconds on average to show its first priced flights, Booking.com 13.34 and Trip.com 12.35, and Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz took between 7 and 9 seconds. Their owners aren’t slow across the board, though: Booking Holdings, which owns Booking.com and Priceline, also owns Kayak, Cheapflights and Momondo, which showed results in 2.51 to 2.72 seconds, and Trip.com Group owns Skyscanner (2.75 seconds). What separated fast from slow in our data was the kind of site, not the size of the company behind it.

This piece regroups the results of our flight search speed benchmark by type of site and by parent company. That guide has the full method and every site’s times route by route; here we look at what the numbers say about the companies, what we saw in the screen recordings, and why a few seconds matter when you’re comparing dates.

What we found when we grouped the sites

We sorted 18 of the benchmark’s 19 sites into three groups by what happens when you choose a flight. The methodology at the end explains the grouping and the judgment calls in it.

• Metasearch engines (Google Flights, Kayak, Cheapflights, Momondo and Skyscanner) averaged 2.27 seconds to first results. The slowest of the five, Skyscanner, came in at 2.75.
• Big online travel agencies (Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Trip.com, Booking.com, CheapOair and Priceline) averaged 11.67 seconds. The fastest of the seven, Expedia, came in at 7.24.
• Other sites (Kiwi.com, Rift, Skiplagged, Alternative Airlines, Hopper and PayLaterTravel) averaged 6.66 seconds, spread widely from 2.63 to 10.19.

On average, the big agencies took about five times as long as the metasearch engines to put the first priced flights on the screen. The two groups didn’t overlap at all: the slowest metasearch engine finished more than four seconds ahead of the fastest big agency.

One site from the benchmark sits outside these groups: our own. Defera’s search came second overall at 1.68 seconds, timed from the Search click inside its app; timed the same way as the other sites, by opening its results page, it averaged 2.08 seconds and was still second. We left it out of the groups so our own site doesn’t tilt either side of the comparison.

Metasearch vs online travel agency: what’s the difference?

The two kinds of sites look alike, with a search box, a date picker and a list of flights, but they do different jobs.

A metasearch engine is a comparison site. It gathers prices from airlines and travel agencies, lists them side by side, and when you choose a flight it sends you to one of those sellers to book and pay. Google’s help pages say Google Flights shows options from more than 300 airline and online travel agency partners and usually takes you to the airline’s or agency’s website to complete the purchase. Kayak calls itself a travel search engine, says it pioneered travel metasearch, and says it doesn’t sell or process bookings itself. Momondo says the same about flights, hotel rooms and car rentals.

An online travel agency, often shortened to OTA, is a store. You search, choose a flight, enter traveler details and pay on its site, and you’re that agency’s customer for the booking. Expedia Group’s annual report says most of its agency bookings are air bookings. Booking Holdings says Priceline offers flight reservations and that Booking.com offered flights in more than 55 markets in 2025. Trip.com Group describes Trip.com as an online travel agency for travelers worldwide.

Which kind of site shows you the lowest fare is a separate question from which one is fastest. We looked at that in our research on whether cheap flight sites really have cheaper fares.

Who owns the fastest and slowest flight search sites?

Ten of the 18 sites we grouped belong to just three companies, and between them those companies reported more than $50 billion in revenue for 2025.

Booking Holdings’ annual report lists Booking.com, Priceline and Kayak among its brands, and Cheapflights and Momondo each say they’re managed by Kayak. Expedia Group lists Orbitz and Travelocity among its other brands and calls itself one of the world’s largest online travel companies; it also reported $119.6 billion in gross bookings for 2025. Trip.com Group lists Skyscanner in its portfolio of brands and has included it in its consolidated results since December 2016. Outside those three, Google Flights belongs to Google, and CheapOair is run by Fareportal, a New York travel company whose brands also include OneTravel.

Read the chart from top to bottom and the owners repeat. Booking Holdings and Trip.com Group appear near the top and again near the bottom. The company name doesn’t predict a site’s speed; the type of site does.

Booking Holdings: the fast end and the slow end under one roof

Booking Holdings is the clearest case. Its three metasearch brands were among the quickest sites in the benchmark: Kayak, at 2.51 seconds, was the fastest grouped site after Google Flights, and Cheapflights (2.57) and Momondo (2.72) were close behind. Its two agency brands were among the slowest: Booking.com averaged 13.34 seconds, and Priceline averaged 16.65, the slowest of all 19 sites.

So Priceline took about 6.6 times as long as Kayak to show its first priced flights, and Booking.com about 5.3 times as long. Taken together, the company’s metasearch brands averaged 2.60 seconds and its agency brands about 15.0, a gap of nearly six to one.

The gap was widest on the longest route. From New York to London, Kayak averaged 2.37 seconds, Booking.com 16.96 and Priceline 20.49. On a short domestic hop, Atlanta to Orlando, Kayak took 2.23 seconds and both agency brands took more than 15.

The three Kayak-run sites behaved almost identically, landing within 0.21 seconds of each other overall. A plausible explanation, which Booking Holdings doesn’t confirm in its filings, is that they share Kayak’s search technology. The annual report does say how Kayak earns money: from sending referrals to partners and from advertising placements. Booking.com, by contrast, is above all a lodging business. Its parent calls it the world’s leading brand for online accommodation reservations, measured by room nights, and flights are one product among several.

Trip.com Group: Skyscanner vs Trip.com

Trip.com Group’s two sites in the test split the same way. Skyscanner, which the group’s annual report describes as a global travel search company, averaged 2.75 seconds. Trip.com, which the report describes as an online travel agency, averaged 12.35 seconds, about four and a half times as long.

Skyscanner was the slowest of the five metasearch engines, but only 0.24 seconds behind Kayak. Trip.com never came close on any route: its fastest route average, 9.88 seconds from Los Angeles to Dallas–Fort Worth, was nearly three times Skyscanner’s slowest, 3.38 seconds from New York to London.

Expedia Group: three brands in a tight cluster

Expedia Group had no flight metasearch site in the test; its majority-owned metasearch company, trivago, compares hotels. Its three flight-selling brands landed close together: Expedia at 7.24 seconds, Travelocity at 8.52 and Orbitz at 8.56, all within 1.32 seconds.

Travelocity and Orbitz were 0.04 seconds apart overall and tracked each other route by route: 6.49 and 6.30 seconds from Atlanta to Orlando, 8.20 and 8.17 from New York to Los Angeles, 6.09 and 6.27 from Miami to Cancún, and 9.70 and 9.44 from Seattle to Boise. Expedia itself was the quickest of the three on four of the six routes and tied with Travelocity on a fifth.

It’s tempting to conclude that the three run on one platform. That is a plausible explanation, but we couldn’t confirm it. Expedia Group’s annual report says it brought the front ends of its core brands (Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo) onto a single technology stack. It lists Orbitz and Travelocity separately and doesn’t say what they run on.

Expedia was the fastest of all seven big agencies, and it was still more than four seconds behind the slowest metasearch engine.

The gap held on every route

The pattern isn’t the product of one bad route. Here are the group averages for each route, calculated from the benchmark’s per-route times:

No metasearch engine averaged more than 3.42 seconds on any route, and no big agency averaged less than 4.21 seconds on any route. The agencies were also less predictable. Each metasearch engine’s six route averages stayed within about 1.4 seconds of each other; each big agency’s spread from 4.7 to 8.9 seconds.

The transatlantic search was the slowest route for both groups, but it cost them very different amounts of time. Compared with each group’s average on the other five routes, New York to London added about a third of a second for the metasearch engines and more than three seconds for the big agencies.

What the recordings showed: streaming results vs a loading screen

First, what we observed. In our screen recordings, the fast sites put flights on the screen as soon as they had the first ones and kept adding more while the page was open. Several of the slower sites held a loading screen until a full, priced list was ready, then showed it all at once.

That difference in behavior lines up with the difference in speed, and it has a practical side: on a site that streams results, the first flights you see aren’t necessarily all the flights it will find. The benchmark timed the first priced flights, not the complete list.

Why would an agency site wait? The companies don’t say in anything we reviewed, so what follows is our reading of the pattern, not a finding:

• Plausible explanation: for a metasearch engine, the results page is the product. Booking Holdings says Kayak earns money from referrals and advertising, so it gets paid when you see results and click through. Showing flights quickly keeps you on the page.
• Plausible explanation: an agency is quoting a price it will charge you. A site that takes your payment may prefer to show a complete, sorted list it can stand behind, rather than early results that could reshuffle or change price.
• Plausible explanation: an agency results page may do more work per flight, such as applying its own discounts, member prices or fees, and that can take longer to assemble.

What the data does argue against is a simple size story. Booking Holdings and Trip.com Group run some of the fastest sites in the test alongside some of the slowest, so the gap doesn’t look like a matter of money or engineering resources at the parent company.

Why speed matters when you’re comparing dates

A single search that takes 13 seconds instead of 2.5 is a minor annoyance. The cost adds up when you compare dates, because finding a good fare usually means running the same trip many times: shifting the departure by a day or two, trying a different return, checking a nearby airport.

Say you run 10 searches. At each site’s average time to first results, this is how long you’d spend waiting before any flights appear:

On Priceline’s average, 10 searches add up to nearly three minutes of waiting for first results; on Kayak’s, about 25 seconds; on Google Flights’, about 8. Because the fast sites keep adding flights after the first ones appear, the gap in time to a complete list could be smaller or larger than this. The benchmark didn’t measure it.

Comparing dates is worth the effort, because the day you fly and how far ahead you book can move the fare. Our research on the cheapest day of the week to fly and on how fares moved in the weeks before departure covers both. A few ways to keep date comparisons quick:

1. Use a date view instead of separate searches. Google’s help pages describe a Dates view that shows which travel dates have the best fares, and a Price graph for exploring fares by week or month when your dates are flexible.
2. Explore on a fast site, then confirm where you’ll pay. Speed and price are different things. Check the final price, bag rules and change rules on the site you’ll actually book with.
3. Give a streaming results page a few seconds. The first flights appear quickly, but the list can keep growing after that.
4. Search the same dates on more than one kind of site. A slow agency page isn’t a worse deal by default, and a fast one isn’t a better deal.

What this data can’t tell you

• Price. The benchmark measured how fast the first priced flights appeared, not which site had the cheapest fare or the most flights.
• Complete results. We timed first results, not the moment each site’s list was finished.
• Every setup. The tests ran on one day, October 20, 2026, in desktop Chrome on macOS with a warm browser cache. Phone apps, other browsers, other networks and other times of day may give different numbers.
• Every trip. We tested six round-trip routes for one adult in economy, on April 2027 dates. Multi-city trips, premium cabins and larger groups weren’t part of it.
• Causes. We observed how the pages loaded. The explanations above are our interpretation, not statements from the companies.
• The future. Sites change their search pages often, and a redesign can change these numbers in either direction.

For every site’s route-by-route times and the full method, see Which flight search engines load the fastest?