“Be a better online booker”

Posted: 30 Oct 2010 09:36 PM PDT

If you're one of the 1.5 million or so people in the United States onboard an aircraft on any given day, you probably booked your flight online. You might have used a search engine like Orbitz or TripAdvisor or maybe an airline's website, say USAirways, Continental or even the notoriously proprietary Southwest Airlines. Each site has a slightly different look and feel, but also many similarities. Why? The same software, belonging to Cambridge's ITA or Innovative Travel Technology, drives each of the search engines - software engineered by a brainy group of former students at MIT's legendary Artificial Intelligence Lab.

What does this mean for those of us with only normal intelligence?

• Pick your poison: Well, maybe elixir of life. Since the same data base and search technology are behind most of these sites, they are going to find the exact same fares. Oh, they do a great job - the software is able to crunch through a billion or so combinations for each query (imagine!). This is important because each seat on a place can be sold at many different fares. You have to be a computer to go through all the possible airlines, flights, fares and available seats for any given itinerary, especially since it has to be done in real time. No good finding a flight if you can't book it.

So if all the websites use the same data - is there any difference? Is Kayak better than FareCompare? Since they each present the data in a slightly different way, part of the answer is personal preference. Does one site seem cluttered and hard to navigate? Does one use a larger, easier-to-read font?

Details matter, too. Does one site highlight overnight flights or itineraries with extremely tight connections? Does another hide taxes and fees until you're at the booking point or let you build them in on the front end of your search? These features can help avoid frustration and wasted time - let alone possible travel disaster. Check out the sites and decide what's important to you.

• Exceptions: Visit itasoftware.com's customer page to see just how many of the big guys rely on ITA. You'll find Bing, CheapTickets, FareCompare, TripAdvisor, Southwest, Virgin Atlantic, Alitalia and Hotwire, to name a few. But not everyone is in - Expedia, for example, and Google. Does this matter to the average Joe trying to book a flight online? Perhaps not yet. (Though Google is now trying to buy ITA, a merger the Department of Justice is investigating. Think of it - one company in charge of, well, almost everything to do with online booking!)

There are others out there. Some are mainstream and offer true options, like airfarewatchdog.com, with its use of real live humans to search out real deals (though through a limited number of cities). Others are more on the sidelines, like vayama.com, a newbie aiming at the international travel market.

No matter which one you book with, be smart. Computers (not being human and therefore not having common sense) can offer absurd itineraries - say taking 20 hours to get from Manchester to Miami, with a 17-hour layover in Chicago, all to save $50. Computers can patch together international itineraries using several airlines through multiple countries.

This may be cheap, but it's disaster if your luggage is lost or you miss a leg - guaranteed!

• What's next? How about an app to give you live access to ITA fare data right from your cell phone? ITA recently rolled out OnTheFly, a mobile application for iPhones and Androids that lets the smart-phone-savvy among us do detailed and complex fare searches right from our phones. Nifty. It has multiple search parameters (number of passengers, cabin class, etc.), an intuitive calendar, charts for checking out multiple itineraries and more. Download it free from apple.com or android.com. It's geared for those who know their way around fare charts and booking codes, and you can't book from the app itself. You have to follow nicely formatted directions and call an agent or airline. But it's a leap forward and has gotten good reviews from road warriors and frequent flyers. (next page »)

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