Did you have any experince with these? Instead of booking directly at Swiss.com supposedly I could save around 200 chf, which is around 20% of the price, so not that small difference. The flights are direct so the risk of something going terribly wrong seems small. But I never used non-original-carrier websites, hence the question.
I saw that, but wanted to get more views from our members, especially after Corona chaos. Seems to me that the problems are occurring mainly with cheap carriers are Whizzair or Ryanair
I only book directly with airline after the past 2 years. I find the savings will easily be wiped out if anything goes wrong and I am not willing to deal with that.
Last couple of years I had to use an agent like that twice, and both times when I needed to change something on my flight I was stuck in administrative hell between the agent and the airline.
The agent always tells you to deal with the airline, the airline tells you (correctly) that the agent issued the ticket, so they have to process name changes, flight re-bookings, attach infant ticket to different ticket, or whatever.
With opodo last summer the back and forth happened a couple of times, and it was kind of a sh1tshow to re-attach the baby's ticket to my wife instead of me.
This year, despite me promising myself I won't do it again, I "had to", as booking.com was substantially cheaper than dealing with Swiss, and again I needed to move the infant's ticket to my wife, and could not actually do it. It was literally easier to change my schedule and take an extra flight so that I could fly with my family as originally planned, as booking.com was just impossible to deal with.
I've flown quite a bit the last 2 years, and the only flights that were with an agency got weird for me and I had to change something, so Murphy's law at its best...
I understand it can be tempting with agents for the cost difference some times, but it comes at potential costs like above, so just keep that in mind...
As Don Molina says, if anything changes or is outside of your control (e.g. a flight is cancelled) then you will find Bravofly completely useless and unresponsive. Also if flights are cancelled there is a strong likelihood that you will face issues with refunds e.g. delayed or offered vouchers instead.
I actually found the customer service to be in order. I would call in the evening and get through to English speaking Indian call centre. The delays in refund was due to the airline. The bad thing was that they charge service fees for everything. There was also a hidden 40CHF credit card charge added to the bill after I clicked 'pay'.
I also used gotogate recently, that credit card fee is NOT added after you click 'pay' - it's visible on the last step. The amount they charged my CC was exactly correct. I had no issues with them - but then my 4 flights were ok - no issues with the,