TRAVEL TECH
Hello, Good Buys: Four Sites That Offer Fare Help
Sunday, September 10, 2006; Page P02
Move over Travelocity, Expedia and Orbitz. A new generation of travel Web sites is emerging, and they're looking to revolutionize the online purchase of airfares. The brainchildren of PhD-in-mathematics types, the sites use what is called predictive technology." No crystal balls are involved: The sites mine and analyze historical airfare prices so consumers will know better when to push the button and buy.
John Bray, vice president of advisory services at the travel research firm PhoCusWright, said travel technology visionaries "have been saying for some time, 'We've got to create our own iPod for the travel industry.' " The new sites, he said, are evidence that "we're now seeing the beginning of these killer applications emerging."
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We asked staff writer Carol Sottili to check out four of the sites.
What it does best: Even though it's still in the testing phase, the site already has plenty of a wow factor. Tell it you want to fly between Dulles and Boston on specific dates, for example, and it'll come up with flight choices. Also, one of five different colored arrows indicates which way fares are headed, and how much confidence the site has in that prediction. Request a flexible search and the site will compare fares between two cities over a 30-day period.
Don't know where you want to go, but just want to find somewhere cheap? Plug in your home airport and do an "all cities" flexible search: A map pops up with fares to cities nationwide. Other cool features include easy-to-use slider bars that can narrow your search by price, time and length. JetBlue results included.
Where it falls short: The site is currently limited to 57 domestic airports (users can vote for which cities they want included next). Though it transfers you to an airline site to book a fare, it can take a little time, and occasionally, the fare is no longer available. Doesn't display prices for Southwest, although it does offer schedule info and considers Southwest prices when making fare predictions.
Our grade: B+ . . . with strong potential for an A as it increases its workload with additional airport results.
What it does best: One of the more established sites (it's out of the testing phase), Farecompare collects historical pricing info for more than 77,000 city pairs covering the United States and Canada. It figures out minimum, average and maximum fares, updating its database three times daily with about 6 million fares. The site also looks for mysterious "Y-up" or "Q-up" fares, basically cheap business-class seats. The site's handlers do a great job ferretting out useful fare info.
On a recent Thursday, it alerted readers that American "had slipped a disc" and was offering first-class tickets between Phoenix and Detroit at $124 round trip; the intelligence checked out when we fake-booked it at http:/
Where it falls short: It doesn't link you directly to the airlines to purchase. Instead, it directs you to the site's partners -- Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz and Priceline, which all charge a booking fee. Southwest is not included in the results.
Our grade: B+ . . . but only because its insider alerts add enough extra credit to raise it from a B.
What it does best: We can only talk potential for this one, but it shows promise. Now in the early testing phase, it eventually plans to allow consumers to see all of their best flight options and fares over a 30-day period from point A to B in one quick search. For now, you can see how it will work by clicking on Minneapolis to Washington Dulles. A graph pops up with a month of fares. Click on how long you want to stay (one to seven nights), and the best fares on the best dates pop up in green. You can further filter your search by times, number of stops and other nearby airports. It plans to calculate more than 100 million airfares daily.
Where it falls short: It now only displays results from Minneapolis on Northwest Airlines, but plans to launch an expanded testing phase with other markets and airlines in the next few months.
Our grade: Incomplete . . . but work habits indicate the potential for a high B.
What it does best: This metasearch site is one of the more established. Though it doesn't specialize in historical airfare tracking, it apparently realizes the potential. The site recently launched its third tool for discovering trends: The "best fare trend" graph pops up when you do a query between heavily traveled markets and indicates whether the average fare has gone up or down in the past 90 days.
Click on "details" to be directed to the site's "best fare history" info, which shows the cheapest fares between those markets found by other users within the past 36 hours. Kayak Buzz displays the best fares that fellow site users have found over the past two days from a designated departure airport to the top 25 searched destinations across the globe, in the United States or various continents and regions. Results include JetBlue.
Where it falls short: The data is based on results found by site users rather than data mined from airfare pricing sources, so info is limited. For example, Kayak says there are trend graphs for 415,000 city pair/date combos covering the most heavily traveled markets, but such routes as Washington to New York don't always make the cut. No Southwest results.
Our grade: C+ in this subject matter . . . but because this site has such high overall quality, we may be grading harder based on elevated expectations.
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