Animals rely on chemical signals to detect, identify, discriminate, and find the resources critical for their survival and fitness, including food, shelter, and mates. Detecting and following chemical cues is challenging, and animals that search using smell display a diversity of morphological, physiological and behavioral adaptations. A decrease in speed and an increase in sampling rates are commonly used behavioral strategies when odor tracking in a turbulent olfactory environment. As flying, echolocating mammals, bats face constraints related both to change in speed and sampling (sniffing), yet odors cues are thought to be important for fruit and nectar feeding bat. Using a behavioral assay combined with three-dimensional tracking software, we quantified the olfactory search behaviors in flying Jamaican fruit-eating bats (Artibeus jamaicensis). Wild individuals were trained to seek out an odor reward (banana) or odor only (banana extract) from among five potential options in a flight cage. Bats were highly successful at choosing the scented platform for both banana and odor only treatments. However, bats rarely investigated the correct platform first, and instead investigated an average of three out of the five platforms before making a choice. During these investigation flights, bats did not significantly reduce their speed, but did get very close to the odor. Together, this suggests that rather than using odor plume information for locating odor source, bats use a serial sampling strategy to locate, discriminate and then choose an odor source. Understanding the role of olfactory cues in foraging decisions and search behaviors of bats may have important implications for understanding how bats use the landscape, and how habitat loss may influence search behaviors.