Pages

Thursday, April 2, 2015

The Best Way to Find an Airfare Online. Google Enters The Fray

The Best Way to Find an Airfare Online

Booking a flight gets more complicated with Expedia’s mergers and Google’s quiet entry into the fray



By 

13 COMMENTS
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 Orbitzis 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.
Advertisement
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 Sites may have price quotes out of date by a few minutes or even a couple of hours—they store up prices so they can answer customer queries very quickly, while others take slightly more time to check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.
ENLARGE
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.
Mr. Schulze says Expedia had been providing search technology to Travelocity since 2013, but the company has kept different features on the sites. He said it’s too early to comment on plans for Orbitz.
While booking sites have been consolidating, search sites have been proliferating. Players range from giants, like Microsoft and its Bing search site, to garage-type startups like Momondo, launched by a small group of Danish developers and now backed by a Boston private-equity firm.
Google Flights doesn’t sell tickets. It’s a search site but not an online travel agency. It is making a splash in the industry by giving shoppers loads of information about flights in easy-to-use ways.
So far, Google hasn’t promoted it. You can find it at google.com/flights or by running a Google search for a trip, such as “flight from Boston to Cleveland on April 15.”
When you do find it, you’ll see it doesn’t look or run like other search sites. Put in your cities and dates and it automatically lists options. Google Flights shows what it calls cheapest, fastest and best itineraries. Using data from Routehappy, which provides data on airline amenities, Google Flights shows which flights have Wi-Fi, on-demand video and other amenities, what the average legroom is for the coach cabin on each plane and whether the flight has a bad track record of delays greater than 30 minutes.
ENLARGE
With Google’s mapping technology, a Google Flights search shows the lowest price at alternative airports on a map, so you can tell exactly how far Manchester, England, is from London, for example. The calendar for picking travel dates shows prices on each day, and clicking on the map shows a handy bar chart of prices so you can easily compare dates.
Like Kayak, Google can pair flights from different airlines into a single round-trip itinerary—an advantage over just shopping airline websites.
Google lacks many direct links to booking tickets. In some cases Google Flights offers the very 1990s advice of calling the airline to book, and builds in the typical $25 telephone booking fee.
Sometimes it gives just plain bad booking advice. It finds trips on multiple airlines that are competitors instead of partners, but those often have to be booked by online travel agencies, not airlines. For a trip departing on American and returning on Delta, Google Flights linked to American’s website for booking. When you go there, you’re greeted by red letters saying, “Check below for errors.”
Another glitch: With some airlines—JetBlue, for example—Google Flights can send you to the generic home page after a search without inputting your itinerary. Then you have to re-enter your dates and times again for the flights you wanted.
A spokeswoman declined to comment on specific questions about Google Flights. Google is “continuing to improve the product and underlying technology,” she says.
Many consumers believe smart shoppers need to clear the cache and cookies in their own computers—elements merchants store so they recognize you when you return and tailor advertising and offers to your interests. The fear is that if airlines and travel sites know you go to Cleveland regularly on Friday afternoons, they may only show you higher fares to Cleveland for Friday afternoon flights.
Experts say there’s no evidence of that. There have been some instances of hotel pricing being tailored to particular customers, but not with airlines. Airline websites guarantee they have the airline’s lowest prices, and it’s cheaper for airlines if consumers book directly with them rather than through third parties. If they discriminated against customers in pricing, smart shoppers would find cheaper fares on other airlines, saysDavid Tossell, vice president of travel and hospitality at DataArt Inc., a technology consulting firm, and a former Travelocity manager.
“There is a point where people become price-sensitive,” he says.
Henry Harteveldt, co-founder of Atmosphere, says his research has never turned up airline price discrimination. Mr. Hafner of Kayak agrees. Kayak’s deals with carriers oblige them to give the site the lowest price, he says.
Best advice for consumers now: Shop several search sites, such as Kayak, Google, Hipmunk or Skyscanner. They are strong and reliable, but have different features. See which ones you like best. Hipmunk shows options in useful time bars so you can easily schedule. Skyscanner lets you easily shop inventory available in other countries where airlines may be running specials.
Once you find what you want, book directly at the airline. Booking on the airline website gives you the best shot at accurate information about what you get—or don’t get—with that fare, plus add-on fees or buying potential upgrades. You also stand a better chance of getting your Known Traveler number to TSA PreCheck if you’re enrolled.
Write to Scott McCartney at middleseat@wsj.com


There are 13 comments.
NewestOldestReader Recommended

Sebastian Gonzalez

No matter what, I will never buy on Expedia. Last year my father in law had a car accident so we had to return our rental car before the time. Eventough the rent a car didn't charge them , Expedia charged me the entire time, very disappointing. They only care for the money I even sent the death certificate .
Edward Blessman

I use ITA matrix to research flights and then book directly with airlines.
Often booking the legs as one way flights does not cost more.  It lets you mix airlines and if you have to change a flight I don't pay change fees, I just discard that leg and rebook.  It is usually less expensive.
John Aquino

You can avoid all the search engines if Southwest is an option. Just book with them. Even if it is not the lowest fare, you won't get stuck in some sub-coach seat or nicked for $50 if you check a bag. And you don't have to flush your money if you need to change your flight.

James Campbell

@John Aquino Well, I think that is part of the idea at Southwest; i.e. make it inconvenient for people to shop WN fares and/or compare flight duration & stops with other airlines with similar fares. 

Rocco Cappeto

Southwest has always been the best option on the routes it flies.  All tickets are priced as one way, last minute changes are not penalized, and getting a good seat is easy as can be if you get your boarding pass on line.  I've never had a seat on Southwest that is as bad as seats I've had on other airlines and I've never had to wait for a gate agent to show up to let us off the plane.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)