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Airline information on-line on the Internet FAQ
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Some fares are marked "good buy" which means that they're only available on
Travelocity. But that doesn't mean that they're any cheaper than other fares.
All fares now include a $5/ticket service fee.
Travelocity includes a "last minute deals" feature which is a rebranded
version of Site59 (http://www.site59.com), which Travelocity owns.
Expedia: Expedia (http://www.expedia.com) was Microsoft's flashy entrant into
the web travel biz. In July 2001 they sold a controlling interest to USA
Networks, owner of Home Shopping Network and other great cultural monuments.
In August 2003, the two companies were merged under the extremely trendy name
of IAC/InterActive Corp, along with hotels.com, Match.com and LendingTree. It
still has that Microsoft feel, although I can hardly wait to see them start
cross-selling. The site is garish, but it's reasonably easy to negotiate and
to find schedules and fares. Underlying info is from Worldspan, prices now
include a $5 per ticket service fee. You have to provide a credit card number
to make a reservation, even if you don't want to buy immediately. Early on,
when I tried to reserve, it said it the credit card link was down, no
reservations possible, call a number in Florida if it's urgent. Yeah, right.
(At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1.) It seems to work better now. There's also
lots of promos and tie-ins, with Expedia-only special fares. You can sign up
for weekly e-mail about best fares on routes you select. Your web browser must
accept cookies or Expedia doesn't work.
Apollo systems:
Internet Travel Network (http://www.itn.net) is now part of American Express.
It's a WWW-based flight booking system. You make reservations, using Apollo,
which are then ticketed by American Express, unless you entered via another
agency's web site. Several other sites on the net including several airlines
have ``private label'' connections to ITN, but it's the same system, usually
just with slightly different screen backgrounds and titles. The base ITN
system uses data from Apollo, but apparently some of the private label
versions use other CRS. Now that Easy Sabre is gone, this is the only system I
know that can display available fare classes, an important feature for some
kinds of discounts and special fares. It also displays an approximate number
of seats available in each fare class, useful both for guessing whether you
need to buy a cheap ticket right away, and for seeing which flights are likely
to have seats available for upgrades to first class. Set your display
preferences to ``expert.''
Worldspan (http://www.worldspan.com) is another large international CRS. They
provide a Web availability and pricing system, which underlies the web sites
of participating agents as well as the Delta and Northwest web sites, only
available via customer sites, not on their own site. It's the system that
underlies Expedia (described above) and Orbitz (described below).
* Orbitz
Orbitz (http://www.orbitz.com), was intended to be the "killer" airline ticket
web site. Founded by United, Northwest, Continental, Delta, and American, it
was sold in October 2004 to Cendant, a large travel company that owns Avis
rent-a-car and Ramada Inns and dozens of other familiar chains, and is now in
the process of being spun off as a standalone company along with some smaller
travel companies that Cendant bought along the way. At least 30 airlines
including the founders are Orbitz charter affiliates, which means they give
all of their web fares to Orbitz. It has a very nice lowest fare search
engine. You can tell it to add alternate airport within 70 miles, and it gives
you the possible routings, cheapest first. It now lets you give a range of
dates, or say that you want to take a weekend trip in a particular month, and
it gives you a grid showing the lowest available fare for each combination of
departure and return dates. They promise unbiased fare and schedule listings,
and have agreements with affiliate airlines to include all publicly available
fares (a term that is harder to define than it looks) such as web specials.
Their search engine does a more thorough job than others (it's written in Lisp
and runs on PCs, the others are written in assembler on mainframes) so it'll
often find fares and connections that are entirely valid but not shown on
other systems. They also have some spiffy customer service, e.g., they can
call you or send a text message to your mobile phone or PDA a few hours before
flight time to tell you your gate and whether there are delays. They charge a
service fee of $6 per ticket.
Trip.com (http://www.trip.com) has been merged into Cheap Tickets.
Cheap Tickets (http://www.cheaptickets.com) originally sold mostly cheap
tickets to Hawaii, but is now a general purpose online agent. I gather that
unlike most other web sites, the live agents at their 800 number have access
to fares not on the web site and often not available through other sites.
Owned by Cendant, being spun off in the same travel company as Orbitz,
although the sites remain separate.
* Amadeus
AmadeusLink (http://www.amadeus.net/), was started in 1987 by four European
airlines and in 1995 absorbed System One which started a long time ago as
Eastern Airlines' reservation system. They offer extensive schedule and
availability info, along with rental car, hotel, and destination info. For
bookings, you need to use a subscribing travel agency, such as one of the
agent systems that link to Amadeus such as TripWeb and Travelweb, below. The
AmadeusLink booking systems all link into the same site, so other than some of
the graphics, the function they provide is identical.
TripWeb (http://www.tripweb.com) is run by a Florida travel agency and offers
search and bookings through Amadeus, with free ticket delivery. Underneath
it's ITN, but it uses Amadeus for underlying data.
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