Thursday, May 12, 2011

The Smart Traveler's Choice Opting For Online Travel Sites

By Michael Russell


I can feel summer arriving. Dreaming about the places I would like to go to is what I do every year and now is the time to dream again. Sydney, Paris, and Seattle to name a few. I may not have enough time and money yet to take a trip but with the Internet it is possible for me to search for flights from my windowless office. Usually, traditional travel agents are able to travel more because of the existence of online travel agencies which frequent travelers are familiar with.

Lesser known are the travel search engines that check multiple sites at once and can uncover Web specials and airlines that the big three online agencies might miss. To check four of them out, I searched for 11 imaginary trips through Labor Day. The search engines typically gave me the best fares. If you are planning a recent trip to San Francisco, search engines can bring you to the airlines' Web sites for direct booking without fees so that you need not pay the service fees charged by most agencies. Taking the agencies' fares into consideration, it becomes a few dollars pricier after all the fees are added.

They do not allow the multisite engines to search their sites but these two major online travel sites gave me the cheapest fares. Changing in an instant are the availability and prices here. Checked within five minutes of one another were all seven sites and each trip was searched twice here. For many online travel agencies, they are able to provide better customer service not to mention package deals with hotels and so customers should not only consider the price.

For one agency, they were the most flexible among the rest. What you can find is a two to four day trip between July 15 and Aug 3 apart from the cheapest weekend trip in June. From two other agencies came about offering for tickets for adults, seniors, and minors while this one let me specify either infant in lap or infant in seat.

Although I did not search for cheaper fares from nearby airports or dates, all three sites alerted me to these. There was a nice calendar showing fares for the entire month being offered by one of these sites. In one occasion, I was looking for departure times but there was one agency that sorted everything out by price. Going through numerous cheap afternoon flights does me no good when I need to be there for a 9 am meeting and this is because the company sorts their flights based on price categories.

Offering more options than the rest was this very flexible search site. Offered by this company is the opportunity for me to search for multicity as in New York to Chicago to Boston to New York and so called open jaw trips flying from New York, but returning to Boston. Similar to other agency sites, it uses email fare alerts too. A feature limited to the agency sites started by them was a beta test for flexible date searching up to three days before or after.

Very convenient was what it was. Possible from four sites were multicity searches but automatically filling in the next box was done by this one. From these sites are tools for narrowing, expanding, and comparing flight results. Related options are eliminated if you remove a check mark next to an airline. Not to mention removing all evening flights you can also decide to add flights from a nearby airport.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment