Airline information on-line on the Internet FAQ

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AirTreks (http://www.airtreks.com) has a spiffy web site that helps construct and price multi-stop and round-the-world international travel. They're a travel agency, the site estimates the price, exact prices and tickets come from live agents at the agency. (That's what you want, no computer can navigate the swamp of international routes and fares very well.)

Farepoint (http://www.farepoint.co.uk/) provides a large database of fares via UK travel agents. The site links to some of the agents who offer their service.

Flights.com (http://www.flights.com) (formerly called TISS) is an online database in Germany with current airfares provided by a group of consolidators. They offer departures from a lot of different countries, now including the U.S. They claim the prices they offer are the best available. For routes within the US they act as a front end to flifo. One reader reports a bad experience with their US agent, rebooking his reservation in a way that lost the discount fare he'd reserved, although he'd had good results with their UK agent.

Air Fare (http://www.air-fare.com) tracks lowest fares among major U.S. cities, with daily updates of significantly lower fares. Worldspan-based Res and ticketing also available.

Deal Checker (http://www.dealchecker.co.uk) compares fares and hotel prices from major UK web sites.

* Real-time flight status and information

The extremely cool service from TheTrip (http://www.trip.com/) (scroll down to Flight Tracker on their home page) gives you a real-time position map and ETA for most domestic flights. Choice of plain text or way beyond cool animated Java relief maps, and you can tell it to send e-mail when the plane arrives, or an hour or two before. If you haven't already got your ticket, they offer ITN for info and ticketing.

Expedia (http://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=flin) now has real-time flight ops including times and gates for major US airlines.

The Track A Flight (http://www.trackaflight.com/) service (formerly Flyte Trax, same organization as flytecomm.com) also provides real-time position map and ETA for most domestic flights, by flight number, or departing or arriving airports. It's as nice as TheTrip.

Flight Arrivals (http://www.flightarrivals.com/) offers impressively complete arrival info for most US airports. (It even has info for the teensy Ithaca NY airport.) No maps, but lots of data.

* Itinerary Lookup

Each of the GDS has a web site where you can look up the details of the record for a reservation if you have the locator code, generally a sequence of six letters or digits, and the passenger's last name. A single trip can have information on more than one system. For example, if you make a United Airlines reservation on Travelocity, the main Travelocity record is on Sabre, but there's a copy on United's home system Galileo, as well. Each system has a different locator code, and it can be hard to find the codes for other than the original system. Virtually There sometimes shows the locator for other system records as the Confirmation field, although you have to figure out or guess which system it's on.

Every travel agent except Orbitz uses one of the GDS to make its reservations so the master record for each trip is available through one of the systems. The online systems usually show the locator code on one of the confirmation screens, and any airline or local travel agent will tell your the locator for your reservation if you ask. Since Orbitz uses its direct connect technology to make reservations directly with many airlines, the master record is on Orbitz itself and as far as I can tell you can't tell the airline's locator until you get your boarding pass.

Virtually There (https://www.virtuallythere.com) can show records from Sabre inclding reservations on Travelocity, American Airlines, and US Airways.

Check My Trip (https://www.checkmytrip.com) can show records from Amadeus, including reservations on Continental and many European airlines.

My Trip and More (http://www.mytripandmore.com/) can show records from Worldspan, including reservations on Delta and Northwest.

View Trip (https://www.viewtrip.com/en-us/ViewTrip.asp) can show records from Galileo, including reservations on United.

Some of these systems will also show rental car and hotel info if they're included in the same records.

* What about the airlines' own web sites??

Many airlines are on the World Wide Web. Five good directories of them are:

http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Shopping_and_Services/Trave... http://www.airlineguide.info http://smilinjack.com/airlines.htm http://flyaow.com/

This list contains only airlines sites that have schedule or booking information available; see the pages mentioned above for lots of other airline web pages with other info.

In the discussions below, flight ops means flight operations, that is, delays, gates, cancellations, and the like. Ticketless ticketing means that rather than issuing a real ticket, the airline sends you a receipt with a ticket number. You cite that number and show ID when you check in. They send the receipt via e-mail, fax, or (if there's time) snail mail. You pay with a credit card.

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