We needed to travel from BOM - DXB - DEL this month and the trip cost Rs. 26k on Emirates site which is a pain to use since it does not display the fares until AFTER you select the departure time unlike other airlines like Jet or Indigo.
So if you want to know the lowest fare of a particular day, you would have to keep wasting time going back and forth between 2 pages which is retarded.
So I tried Goibibo since Makemytrip had similar rates to the direct booking from emirates. Surprisingly, it was priced at only Rs.20 k for the round trip so I paid for it immediately.
This included a bonus coupon of Rs. 3k off for all international round trips which popped up when it asked for any discount codes.
This made the approx Rs. 550 in commission / booking fees not a problem. I was glad that the 2 one-way counted as a round trip.
The only downside of Goibibo [other than the silly name] was that Emirates tickets were being issued manually so you do not get a PNR within a minute of payment like other sites.
We did get it within an hour as promised on the confirmation page:
’Great, your booking went through successfully.
Congratulations, your payment is successfully charged and we have shared all the details with the airline. We have successfully booked your seats with the airline. We are waiting for the confirmation details from the airline. We will be sharing the confirmation details within next 90 minutes with you.
Disclaimer: Fares are not guaranteed until the tickets are confirmed by the airlines.’
But due to the significant discount of 23%, it was worth the wait. We had assumed that booking directly with the airline would be cheaper than going via a travel portal but were clearly wrong!
Just to be safe, we used the PNR issued by Goibibo and selected our seats / meals on the Emirates site so we knew it was reconfirmed by the airline also.
All domestic flights should also allow seat selection at the time of booking instead of waiting till web check-in.