How does IQ.gg metasearch for airline tickets, hotels and car rentals work?

David Karlin
3 min readNov 8, 2023

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IQ.gg

IQ.gg helps you search and buy flight tickets. We work on the principle of metasearch — you enter the desired destination and dates, and we collect data from airlines and agencies and show you possible options.

Here’s how it happens.

Go to the website, fill out the search form — and see a list of tickets, conveniently sorted by price, number of transfers, or in another convenient way for you.
Once the ideal ticket is found, we will redirect you to the seller’s website where you can enter your details and make a payment.
Finally, the seller will send an itinerary receipt to you by email.
IQ.gg does not charge a commission for services and displays exactly the same prices that airlines and agencies give.

Why use a metasearch when you can go directly to the airline’s website?

There are many airlines: worldwide there are hundreds of them. There are thousands of online travel agencies (OTA). Without metasearch, you’ll have to go to everyone’s website and search and compare prices manually.

In addition, the cheapest route may be a route made up of tickets from several airlines.

Those same online agencies are able to combine tickets from different companies. When an IQ.gg user clicks the “Search” button, we send them an anonymized request, receive responses from them, sort them and show them to the user. Metasearch helps you see all possible options on one page and choose the one that suits your liking and budget.

Each airline has a number of restrictions caused by the presence of special agreements or membership in one of the alliances.

This means that Thai Airways will never sell a connecting ticket on its website in which one of the segments is operated by Air Asia. And EasyJet won’t offer to fly home with WizzAir, even though it could be significantly cheaper.

The function of compiling such routes is performed by agencies (OTA — online travel agency). They know how to connect tickets from different airlines, combine round-trip flights from different carriers, add favorable cancellation conditions for air tickets (cheaper than the corresponding options from the airlines themselves), and sometimes even offer air tickets at a price lower than that of the carrier.

Metasearch engines also have their own function. It will be most effective to look for tickets specifically at IQ.gg, and here’s why:

— On one page you will see search results for tickets to your destination for your dates on most airlines and OTAs. You don’t have to go to hundreds of sites and manually compare prices and conditions.
— All partners in our search results have been verified — you won’t run into scammers.
— We show a real price, including all those payments that some partners (usually foreign airlines) may add at the very last step of booking.
— You can immediately see whether the ticket comes with luggage or not.

Same principle goes for hotels, car rentals and transfers/taxi services.

Come visit us and check out our offers at https://www.iq.gg

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David Karlin
David Karlin

Written by David Karlin

I write about what's most interesting to me. I run a Flight tickets and hotel booking search website called IQ.gg https://www.iq.gg