An update from today's WS Journal --
It may be time to try new ways to search for the best fare.
The booking side of travel is in a state of upheaval. Like airlines, air-ticket sellers are consolidating. Expedia has already swallowed up Travelocity, and a deal to acquire Orbitz is likely to be completed later this year. Like other areas of online shopping, new entrants with new capabilities and new promises are popping up. And search giant Google is rocking the industry by acquiring a leading reservation technology firm and launching a powerful flight-search site.
All this change means you can get more information about particular flights and add-on fees, but probably not a cheaper fare.
Airlines set the prices for their tickets. To assemble one fare, a booking system has to put together airline schedules with fares that are filed several times a day and then check availability. Some search engines find combinations of flights that produce a lower fare than others quote—pairing flights together from competing airlines, or even connections that airlines themselves didn’t find in giant reservation-system schedules.
“What you think is the lowest fare depends on who’s doing the asking,” says Steve Hafner, chief executive at meta-search site Kayak, which is owned by the Priceline Group.
New trends, like fares that don’t include seat assignments or higher-priced tickets that bundle in a free checked bag, early boarding, extra legroom or other amenities, also cloud what’s really the best deal. Fees charged by some booking sites can also confuse shoppers. CheapOair and OneTravel have booking fees as high as $28 a person that they bake into the fare.
And sometimes the fares quoted really are too good to be true. Sites may have price quotes out of date by a few minutes or even a couple of hours—they store up prices so they can answer customer queries very quickly, while others take slightly more time to check prices in real time with airlines. Click on a cached fare quote that’s changed and you’ll get a frustrating and seemingly suspicious message saying, “Oops, the price has gone up.”
Kayak checks price quotes in real time when the query is made, when someone clicks on a particular flight and when you click to go to a site to book. And 5% of the price quotes turn out to be wrong, Mr. Hafner says.
More than 30% of airline bookings are made through airline websites. Online travel agencies account for 15% to 20%, according to Atmosphere Research Group, a travel research and consulting company. The rest come through travel agencies—mostly business-travel bookings. For people who do book their own tickets, Expedia says the average consumer searches 48 times across websites before purchasing a ticket.
Liz Browning of Seattle books 15 to 20 flights a year for multiple family members on different airlines. She prefers the one-stop, do-it-yourself convenience of online travel agencies.
She was a fan of Expedia for years but lately has grown frustrated with its services. Travelocity and Orbitz don’t look like alternatives because of mergers. “I feel like I don’t have anywhere to go,” she says.
Expedia has been bombarding her with unwanted pop-ups and solicitations. To opt out, she finally felt compelled to call the company. It took three calls and several hours. Expedia also isn’t able to consistently get her Known Traveler number into her airline record, so she says she doesn’t get Transportation Security Administration PreCheck privileges.
Expedia says customers can opt out of email solicitations by changing preferences in account information and shouldn’t have to call. Senior Vice President Greg Schulze says that through testing, Expedia decided that pop-up ads “will only appear a limited number of times.” The ability to add Known Traveler numbers to profiles is a recent addition and once in an Expedia customer’s profile, Expedia sends the information to airlines with each booking.