Nothing But Net: The Rundown on Travel-Booking Sites on the Web By Craig Stoltz Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, September 13, 1998

And unless you dropped into that cargo hold directly from a passing turnip truck, you also know that Internet travel sites can be time-sucking, soul-draining, hype-infested annoyances – perhaps even less pleasant and efficient, if you can imagine it, than airline telephone reservationists or that travel agent who won't return your calls about needing to score a really low air fare to San Jose.

But you probably remain hopeful about all this Internet travel stuff anyway, and you'd probably like to know which of the many Web sites beseeching you to book your travel is the best. You've come to the right place.

A brief warning: Every Web-based booking site claims to offer the "lowest" air fares. This claim is, to descend into technical vernacular, baloney. As this very newspaper demonstrated in a long, peevishly detailed article published last year, ("'Lowest Fare': Don't Buy It," Dec. 14, 1997), these booking engines often provide very similar price quotes – but also, sometimes, kick out fares hundreds of dollars apart for exactly the same flight at precisely the same moment. Worse, there is no pattern to the inconsistencies; the low fares are just as likely to pop up on Site A as in Site B. (While researching this story we recently replicated similar inconsistencies and can report that little has changed.)

Why is this the case? Mostly because these Web-based booking sites sit on top of three very different travel-industry electronic booking databases, and each taps into its network, and is updated and uploaded and corrected, via very different sets of procedures. But the main point to remember is that, regardless of what the Web sites claim on their own pages, or what their executives say in letters to the editor in response to this article, none of the booking sites delivers air fares consistently lower than the others.

Having said all that, each of the services has some strengths and shortcomings, and a couple have unique features. All offer the ability to make online reservations for air, train, hotels, tours, packages and various other travel products and services. All offer tools like currency converters, weather reports and maps. They all offer information about destinations, some of it as shallow as brochure copy, some from a nominally independent source. They all offer forums where users can presumably share insights and ideas – but where, alas, they usually wind up posting single questions that nobody answers.

Below we give a thumbnail sketch of the major sites aimed at consumers, plus the best and worst features and other items of note.

Atevo

(http://www.atevo.com): A rather bland gathering of travel-related material around the Internet Travel Network's booking tools.

Good: No sign-up or log-in required, so it's easy for casual visitors to explore. Best, easiest-to-use discussion software of the bunch (but few users populate the discussions). Useful link to the 20,000-item Bed and Breakfast Channel.

Bad: News and information consists of alphabetical press releases and undigested airline "specials." Travel warnings not updated daily. Create Your Own Travel Page – a sort of online personals ad announcing your travel preferences – is icky.

And: Cruise area offers novel but marginal opportunity to click a link to have a Cruise Outlet operator call you by phone.

BizTravel

(http://www.biztravel.com): Best choice for devoted road warriors harboring a nerdly fascination with improving the efficiency of their travel lives. But it's so well tailored to this crowd, and such a demanding site to use, that it's of little interest to others.

Good: Attempts (and partially succeeds) in integrating frequent-flier incentives into the trip-planning process. Uses preferences to automate trip-planning decisions, meaning regular users can be spared a lot of detail. Destination information includes unusually frank safety advice, and the travel alerts are among the most detailed and serious-minded available free. News and deal information is well tailored to road warriors and frequent-flier freaks.

Bad: To maximize benefits of the site, you'll spend a lot of time up front keying in travel preferences and information. Site tends to emphasize time, efficiency and mileage maximization over low price or value, meaning it's not very useful if you're a business person flying on your own nickel or on a very tight budget. Fares offered are often higher than other sites'.

Fun fact: Offers a solid "magazine" of columnists and voices about business travel designed to warm the site and create a "community."

Expedia

(http://www.expedia.com) Cool, nearly Sphinxlike interface provides access to some powerful booking technology. But the tools demand some learning and patience. A dependable choice for mainstream travelers, though not as friendly, burnished or rich as Preview Travel.

Good: Solid, deep destination information, some original to Expedia (other material from Moon and Fielding guidebooks). Consistent marshaling of travel news and bargain information. Booking tools use Microsoft's ubiquitous "wizard" gimmick, which attempts to shield non-techies from digital dirty work, making it fairly easy to use after it is learned. Low Fare Finder is very good for surveying possible low fares between two specific points.

Bad: Booking wizards remove control from the user – for instance, yielding fewer flight choices and limiting hotel-amenity filters. Lack of calendar integration in booking screens is annoying. Low-fare tool can't monitor low air fares to a variety of places. Click on a low fare and the system disgorges a screen of utterly impenetrable coding, provided directly by the airline, alleged to "explain" the restrictions on that fare – but in practice utterly useless. Very rarely are the low fares even available. No B&Bs or small hotels.

Fun fact: The site threatens to kick off people who shop too often without buying.

Internet Travel Network

(http://www.itn.com) A decent booking engine surrounded by what feels like a lot of freebies, half-hearted corporate partnerships and discards.

Good: ITN's only serious advantage is for users who don't fully trust making transactions online: The system will let you research a trip and then, if you choose, steer you to a local participating travel agent to complete the transaction. Top-level link to Magellan's travel-products catalogue is a nice touch.

Bad: Destination information is the thin, spotty and oddly Anglo-centric. Travel news is badly organized and often dated. The low-fare feature is provocatively useless: It launches a window on your screen that flashes various Point-X-to-Point-G deals for (precisely) three seconds. Click on a fare if you're quick enough, and a search screen with the two named cities pre-selected pops up – but when you feed in your dates and times, you're highly unlikely to generate the fare that's cited.

Fun fact: Fare nerds take note – sign on as an advanced user and the system will tell you how many seats are available on a particular flight at each price bracket.

Preview Travel

(http://www.previewtravel.com): Probably the best choice for mainstream leisure travelers, combining actively updated, well-targeted content with a well-tuned, traveler-friendly booking process.

Good: Unlike other booking tools, Preview lets you choose the option of morning, afternoon or evening rather than a specific hour. FareFinder is best-of-breed for low-fare surfing: Input any of the local airports (or WAS to capture all three) to see a list of low fares to over 40 national and two dozen international destinations. Click on a fare to sample dates, flights for which that fare applies. A "low" flag waves when a fare is at least 5 percent under the three-month average. Modestly useful find-a-trip tool matches your desires – say, a romantic week in the Caribbean, or an active adventure in the U.S. West – with available packages.

Bad: After producing requested air fares, the system cogitates briefly to seek fares alleged to be even lower…but, maddeningly, often not so. The site's destination information, provided by Fodor's, is cursory and in places dangerously nonjudgmental.

Fun fact: Preview Travel is the first site to permit online booking of cruises, currently just for Royal Caribbean sailings.

Travelocity

(http://www.travelocity.com): A consumer's Web access to Sabre, which is the leading database used by travel agents…raising the question of just how successful Travelocity's backers really want the site to be. It's also owned partly by American Airlines, creating a possible conflict of interest. That said, it's a decent site, but not as rigorously updated or burnished as Preview Travel or Expedia.

Good: Lonely Planet destination information is unusually good (though an odd choice for the mainstream traveler the site targets). Cruise information provided by Cruise Critic, the closest thing to an objective voice on cruising. Very fast database access: Use the "three best fares" function and it produces the goods very quickly.

Bad: Low-fare tool – you choose a departure point to view low fares to 13 cities – doesn't compete with Preview Travel or Expedia's.

Fun fact: The site is pocked with "incentives" and promotions of American Airlines flights, vacations and products.

TheTrip.Com

(http://www.thetrip.com): Accessible tools and information aimed at frequent business travelers. Fewer tricks and tweaks than Biztravel, but easier to use and more friendly. Good choice for a business traveler who abides but does not relish the traveling life – or who is paying one's own travel bills.

Good: Very easy to navigate interface (The Flight, The Hotel, The Ride, The Airport, The City, etc.). Hotel area features a link to Hotel Reservation Network, one of the better online accommodation discounters, offering properties in 16 cities. Destination information is more thorough than Biztravel's. Complete Traveler area is a solid magazine aimed at road warriors. Supplemented by links to Pubcrawler, a good source for nighttime entertainment in a strange city.

Bad: Fare Aware, which generates a report on prices recently paid for travel between city pairs, reveals how shockingly high prices are for business air travel. But it's of little use to those seeking really cheap fares.

Fun fact: Features leading-edge Real-Time Flight Tracker, which lets you watch an animated version of a chosen flight move from departure to destination.