Almost every complaint about airline pricing comes down to the same thing: the number that got someone's attention was not the number they paid. It is worth understanding why, because once you can read a quote properly, comparing two of them stops being guesswork.
The two halves of a fare
An airline fare has two parts. The base fare is what the airline charges for carrying you, and it is the part that moves — the same seat on the same aircraft can be sold at six different base fares depending on when you book and which conditions come attached. The second part is taxes and surcharges: departure taxes, security and airport charges, and the carrier's own imposed surcharges. Those are collected by the airline on behalf of somebody else, or under a code the airline sets, and a legitimate agency passes them through at cost rather than marking them up. On this site you see them itemised, with their codes, before you pay.
Baggage
Baggage is where most of the surprises live. The allowance is set by the airline and it varies by fare, not just by airline — two tickets on the same flight can carry different allowances because they were sold under different fare rules. It is why "cheapest" is a slippery word on a results page: a fare with no checked bag is genuinely cheaper only if you are genuinely travelling without one. We show the allowance against each fare, including when there is none, so the comparison is between like and like.
Conditions, which cost nothing until they matter
Then there are the conditions, which cost nothing until they matter and then cost a great deal. Can the ticket be changed, and for what fee? Is it refundable, and to what — the original card, or a credit? How long does the airline hold the fare before it needs reissuing? A higher fare on the same flight is almost always buying one of those answers rather than a better seat. Whether that is worth it depends entirely on how certain your plans are, which is a question only you can answer, and which is worth actually answering rather than defaulting to the cheapest row.
What an agency adds
The last piece is what an agency adds. We do not add a markup to the taxes, and where a service fee applies it appears as its own line rather than being folded into the fare. What you are paying an agency for is not a better price on the same ticket — it is somebody who can act on the booking afterwards, in a language you prefer, from an office with a phone number. On a simple return with fixed dates that may be worth little. On anything that changes, it is usually the difference between a phone call and a lost afternoon.
If you take one habit from this: before you pay for any flight anywhere — including on our own search — find the total, find the baggage allowance, and find the change fee. Three numbers. If a site will not show you all three before asking for a card, that is the finding.