How we rank results
When offers from different sellers sit side by side, you are entitled to know why that one ended up on top. Below are the main parameters and their weight. This is not the whole algorithm — it is what actually moves the order.
Flight tickets
In the ticket search the order is simple: cheaper first, and at equal prices the one that is faster door to door. Nothing else affects the order.
We show every offer the supplier returned, trimming the list to the best twenty by that same rule. We hide nothing and we lift nothing by hand.
Tickets inside a trip plan
Inside a trip plan the order is more involved, because it takes account of what you told us. By default price weighs 45%, travel time 30% and comfort 25%.
Those weights shift with your answers. A small budget: price weighs 60%, time and comfort 20% each. A large budget: the reverse — price 20%, time 35%, comfort 45%.
Travelling with children moves up to ten percentage points from price to comfort. If reduced mobility is indicated, the shift is larger still: an extra connection for a wheelchair user is not an inconvenience but a separate operation involving a lift and staff, and price weighs least of all.
Accommodation
Accommodation is ordered by three things: price relative to everything else in the same city, the rating from the source, and the fit to what you asked for — proximity to an airport or station, suitability for children, whether there are photographs.
A listing without a single photo sits slightly lower. It is a weak but genuine signal: such a listing is almost always filled in worse.
When the same hotel turns up in several sources — Booking.com, LiteAPI, Google Hotels — we show it once. We keep the offer you can actually book; among several of those, the one priced for your exact dates and number of guests, with the cancellation terms; then the one with softer terms; then the cheaper one.
Ratings and reviews
We take ratings from the source — Booking.com, LiteAPI, Airbnb or Google Hotels — and pass them on as they are. We do not verify them, do not moderate them and cannot confirm that every review was left by someone who actually stayed there.
The only thing we do with them is smooth by the number of reviews. Five stars from two guests do not lift a place above 4.8 from four hundred: a tiny sample proves nothing, and comparing them directly would be a deception.
Booking.com and LiteAPI rate from 1 to 10. On the card the score is shown exactly as in the source; to compare it with five-point ratings we halve it.
Our own interest — and why it does not move the order
Our fee is a fixed part plus a percentage of the ticket price. That means something simple worth saying out loud: a more expensive ticket earns us slightly more.
Which is precisely why the search order is cheapest first and nothing else: a rule that cannot be nudged is more reliable than a promise not to nudge it.
Nobody pays us for a place in the results. We have no paid placement. If it ever appears, every such offer will be marked as advertising — with no exceptions and no small print.
When you book a stay or a car on Booking.com through our link, Booking.com may pay us a commission. It does not affect the order: we do not use the commission in ranking at all, and Booking.com offers sit next to the others under the same rules.
A LiteAPI price may include our markup — we set it ourselves, and it is already in the price on the card, so booking will not cost more than shown. It does not affect the order: we sort by the price you pay, not by what we earn.
What we do not do
- we do not pre-select the more expensive fare;
- we do not say “only two seats left” unless we know it for certain;
- we do not show struck-through prices that never existed;
- we do not reorder results by how much we would earn.
Questions
If something about the order looked odd, write to hello@valizka.com and we will work it out together.