Orbitz Review

Saturday, June 8th

2024 Cruise Vacation Site Reviews

Orbitz

• 7-day popular cruise: same price as buying direct
• 7-day luxury cruise: same price as buying direct
• Extras and experiences offered to add to your trip
• One-stop shop booking for full travel itinerary
• Accredited by the BBB

Orbitz is an online travel agency that is a subsidiary company of Expedia Group. The main difference is that Expedia's prices are a little better than Orbitz's. The browsing and cruise booking experience is the same on both sites, and they both have the same navigational challenges, offers, and options. For this reason, it doesn't matter whether you book with Orbitz or Expedia unless you're already part of the rewards program at Orbitz.

Search doesn't offer a competitive interface

To start a search on Orbitz, you can only select your destination, the range of dates for your ideal travel time, and the number of guests that will be on the cruise. You can't start the search with cruise lines or departure locations like you can with competing travel agency sites. Similar to Expedia, you can limit the cruise line and the type of room you'd like once you start your preliminary search. It's a pretty bare-bones system and isn't the best search engine compared to other companies in our review.

Extras for tickets or activities

One thing we liked was that Orbitz offers an easy-to-see "extras" section on their site, where customers can find event tickets and activities. While these extras can be found on the Expedia site too, they are not as prominently displayed and require more searching.

Prices are the same as buying direct

To get an idea of the price comparison, we looked at two 7-day Caribbean cruises: a popular cruise with Royal Caribbean and a luxury cruise with Oceania. For the 7-day Royal Caribbean cruise, the price - $609 per passenger for an inside room - was the same as buying directly from Royal. For the luxury 7-day cruise with Oceania, Orbitz only offered a B3-level stateroom or PH1 suite. The prices on Orbitz started at $2299, which matched the rates for the B3 level stateroom if you bought direct from Oceania. And if you browsed Oceania's site instead, there were lower-grade rooms available with prices as low as $2,149.

Low ratings from customers

Orbitz is accredited by the BBB and has an "A+" rating. Unfortunately, on the customer side, Orbtiz doesn't do as well. The site averages 1.8 stars out of 5 across popular review sites including Trustpilot, the BBB, and Sitejabber. The complaints about Orbitz range from customers having the prices of their trips changed, to horrible experiences with customer service, and problems with cancellations. The few users who rated Orbitz with 5 stars noted that they liked how easy it was to book large-scale trips with the company. However, there were no 5-star reviews that specifically talked about cruise bookings.

Similar to sister company, Expedia

Orbitz is a widely used travel agency owned by Expedia, but it doesn't offer a competitive cruise search engine compared to other companies in our review. The browsing and booking experience is almost the same as Expedia, but it's a little easier to find "extras" and experiences on the Orbitz website. We don't love how negative the customer reviews are for Orbitz, though.

Better options available

While Orbitz may be worth considering for booking large-scale trips, there are better options available for booking cruises. The fact that their prices are the same as buying direct from the cruise line means this option gets a much lower ranking than its sister site, Expedia.