Travel Article

Airline information on-line on the Internet FAQ

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* Mobissimo

Mobissimo (http://www.mobissimo.com/) is an experimental meta-search that searches lots of other web sites for a pair of cities and dates and shows you what fares it found, with links to the other sites so you can followup.

* Kayak

Kayak (http://www.kayak.com) is a meta-search that looks at lots of airline and agent web sites and produces a combined listing with links you can click through to the various sites to buy. It works well, but as with all combo sites, there are usually interesting sites they don't search so you still have to look for yourself. AOL has a deal with Kayak so they're featured on AOL.

* Sidestep

Sidestep (http://www.sidestep.com) also searches multiple airline web sites to find the lowest fares, along with promotions like weekend fares and extra frequent flyer miles. Their original version is an add-in to Internet Explorer that you download and install so it only runs on Windows with Internet Explorer. (Considering the well known security disaster that is IE, this is a significant drawback.) Now you can also visit their web site and use it like any other search system. It's gotten wonderful reviews but when I've tried to use it I haven't been very impressed with what it found, no better than fare searches at Travelocity, often worse than Orbitz. When you install the IE add-in, it splatters your browser, desktop, toolbar, and start menu with icons which is really annoying.

* Farechase

Yahoo's Farechase (http://farechase.yahoo.com/) is yet another meta-search. It has the slick interface you'd expect from Yahoo, results similar to but perhaps not quite as complete as Kayak.

* Other general sites

OneTravel (http://www.onetravel.com) offers booking and ticketing. (They recently absorbed FLIFO.) A "fare beater" feature searches negotiated and "white label" fares. Similar data to Travelocity, less flashy, but less buggy, too. Data from Amadeus. In some quick tests, Travelocity found fares that they didn't and vice versa, with Travelocity's lower.

Travelweb (http://www.travelweb.com) has a lot of travel info, graphics that look like they were drawn with a crayon (it's an aesthetic effect, I guess), and airline reservations via Expedia.

Destina (http://www.destina.ca) was introduced as a one-stop travel service for Canada, although it was owned by Air Canada. They recently integrated it more tightly with Air Canada's own web site, and at this point it appears to sell only AC tickets, making one wonder why they bothered. They say it'll do more later in the year.

* Fare searches and comparisons

ITA Software (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch) builds the search engine used by Orbitz and an increasing number of airline sites, and you can use a copy of the latest version of their search system. No booking, you have to take what you find and book elsewhere.

Qixo (http://www.qixo.com) searches two dozen airline sites and returns a combined list of the lowest fares found for route. If you book through them, there's a $20 booking fee, but of course once you know the airline and times, there's nothing keeping you from booking up the same flights on another site.

Cheap Flights USA (http://www.CheapFlights.com) and Cheap Flights UK (http://www.CheapFlights.co.uk) offers a nice search engine for low cost tickets from the US and UK, many of which don't appear in the major search engines. Not a travel agency, they link to other agents and airlines where they presumably collect a referral fee (which is fine, it doesn't affect the price of the ticket.)

Sky Scanner (http://www.skyscanner.net) offers an excellent search engine for cheap flights within the UK and Europe. Don't miss their month views with little bar charts of daily fares.

Flight Atlas (http://www.flightatlas.com/) offers cute animated maps showing what routes are available among European airports, with links to the airlines serving them. (To me it looks like of like a game of Battleship.)

SimplyQuick (http://travel.simplyquick.com/discount-airfares/) is an independent guide to who's cheapest online for discount airfares, based on a large survey of the top 8 online booking services, and providing a search tailored city by city (US only). They also rate online travel agents and travel service web sites. They're in New Zealand, but most of the info is for US travellers.

Cheap0 (http://cheap0.com) has comprehensive info on European discount airlines including a map that shows where they all go, and frequent blog style news items on new and changed service.

Discounted international tickets: Apple Fares (http://www.applefares.com) has an excellent search engine for low-cost European airlines. You can search both for specific dates and destinations and for more general questions like weekend trips from London to Spain two weeks from now.

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Airline information on-line on the Internet FAQ