New York area airports have low fare deals to Munich today with Star Alliance leading the way in a sale with all three major alliances starting at $436 round trip for Air Canada JFK one-stop flights and $440 for United Newark EWR nonstop flights. Departure dates start late November and run through March with the usual window of high fares in late December/early January. American and Oneworld Alliance carriers offer fares starting around $475 over the same travel period. These are Momondo.com OTA fares. The United.com and aa.com websites are priced $500 and $514 respectively. SkyTeam airlines are $555 on this route.
United Airlines Newark EWR – Munich nonstop
$499.16 round trip Sat Feb 18 – Sun Feb 26
American Airlines Newark EWR – Philadelphia PHL – Munich nonstop
$513.76 round trip Sat Feb 18 – Sun Feb 26
Using Momondo.com to find lower fares on the airline or route you want
Momondo.com is a power meat-search tool for finding lower fares than the airlines charge for the same flights. Typically I use Google Flights to find the low fare dates and then insert those dates into Momondo.com to check other OTA ticket prices. In about 80% to 90% of checks there is a lower fare found on an OTA. Sometimes these lower fares have a less attractive itinerary with a long layover and sometimes these Momondo.com tickets offer better itinerary options.
Momondo.com OTA meta-search for Newark EWR – Munich MUC Feb 18-26
The United.com $499.16 round trip ticket flying UA nonstop EWR-MUC is available for $441-$454 for same nonstop flights through three different OTA sites.
- TravelMerry.com $441
- CitiAir.com $446
- FareDepot.com $454
But what if I want to Fly American/OneWorld or SkyTeam?
On the left side of the Momondo.com screen are filters allowing powerful sorts for alliances, departing airports, transit airports and specific airlines.
Transit airports come in handy when you want a particular route. For example, in my searches this week for Los Angeles to Copenhagen fares in the $400s, I filtered for Stockholm or SFO to get SAS flights from California and avoid a United flight to Chicago, the lowest fares with an extremely long layover.
When flying SkyTeam you can filter for flights to either Amsterdam or Air France depending on your preference.
But you can’t necessarily rely on Momondo.com to pull up the lowest available fares for every airline.
In the screen shot above, when I check Oneworld Alliance the lowest fares shown are in $700s, yet I have shown there is a $514 American Airlines fare on these same dates for EWR-MUC. In fact, the Momondo.com page does not even include American Airlines in it s list of airline fares.
Momondo.com is a fantastic resource for finding discount Star Alliance and SkyTeam tickets. I find it far less useful for American/Oneworld tickets.The weird thing is I found $475 round trip tickets to Munich on American Airlines through Momondo.com when I started this post. Now I can’t even find American Airlines in the airline options.
