There IS an actual difference among travel websites

Once you’ve chosen a summer adventure and it comes time to book your flight, it turns out all those travel web sites might actually differ in at least one way: price.

While they all promise to find you the cheapest flights (some even base their name on this claim), you’ll find that prices can vary drastically depending on which site you happen to use.

For research purposes, we entered the following one-way flight into various flight-booking sites:

Travel from: DC-area airports (search includes Reagan, Dulles, and Baltimore)
Travel to: London-area airports (search includes Heathrow, Gatwick, Stanstead, Luton, and London City)
Date: May 10, 2008

Here are the cheapest tickets offered from each search engine we tried:

Studentuniverse.com - $312
Expedia.com - $389
Kayak.com - $415
Cheaptickets.com - $426
Orbitz.com - $430
Priceline.com - $827
Travelocity.com - $830

Lesson learned: Do your homework and don’t assume that the first flight you find will be the cheapest. Make sure you use a few different services when looking to book an affordable flight. And as always, book flights as early as you can! – Emily Blanck