Shopping for online travel bargains

By Russell Shaw
Gannett News Service

Summer vacation season is in full swing, but if you haven't planned yours yet, it's not too late because the airlines — still reeling from Americans' post-Sept. 11 ambivalence about flying — are offering bargain fares to many destinations.

Planning air travel and booking tickets online not only is convenient, but it can save you money, especially if you're savvy enough to shop around for the best deal. As with any shopping experience, choices abound when booking airfares in cyberspace.

For example, every major airline now has a secure Web site for booking tickets, and third-party travel sites such as Expedia (www.expedia.com), Travelocity.com (www.travelocity.com) and Orbitz (www.orbitz.com) make it easy to search for flights and fares.

But just as the Internet offers some attractive travel deals, it doesn't always serve up the best price. In fact, it's worth your time to compare online fares with those offered at an airline's toll-free reservation line or even those offered by your agent.

But does one travel-shopping venue offer lower fares more often than the others? We decided to find out by preparing a mix of 10 leisure and business itineraries and looking for the lowest fares from:

• The big-three online travel sites: Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz.
• Airline reservation sites.
• The airlines' toll-free reservation numbers.
• A neighborhood travel agent with access to several industry reservations systems.

We found no clear winner. Of the 10 itineraries, Expedia and an airline's Web site had the lowest fares for two of the routes, while Orbitz, a toll-free airline reservations line and the travel agent each provided the lowest-priced ticket for at least one route. There was no clear winner for the other five itineraries.

These results do not surprise Edward Hasbrouck, author of "The Practical Nomad Guide to the Online Travel Marketplace."

"No one source or Web site consistently has the lowest prices," said Hasbrouck. "Pricing of travel services is surprisingly decentralized, and different Web sites have access to different types of prices from different sources."

"There's no real rationale for why some air fares are the way they are," said travel agent Theresa Prefontaine, of Better World Travel by Journeys, Portland, Ore.

Timing is everything

To some extent, the air fare price you are quoted may have less to do with the site on which you book your ticket as the day and time you do. The reason is a technology called "yield management." Airlines and hotels may tweak the price for a given flight or room on a given day based on the number of reservations they have sold.

If, for example, an 8 a.m. flight on June 18 between Indianapolis and Chicago's O'Hare International Airport still has empty seats this morning, the price may come down.

If a flurry of new reservations comes in by this afternoon, and four seats are left, those prices will spike in the wink of an eye. For any given route, these yield-management systems can spit out a new set of prices, each with its own "rules."

The online travel sites will implement these changes within minutes.

"Both airlines and hotels are engaged in extremely — and increasingly sophisticated — pricing strategies to maximize their revenues," said Hasbrouck. "Their goal is 'price discrimination' — getting each customer to pay as much as they are willing to pay, and no less, even if they are getting the same service. Rules and distributions strategies (such as yield management) are designed to identify how much different customers are willing to pay."

If you're a business or last-minute traveler who books with just a seven-day advance purchase, the odds are stacked more in your favor. After all, if a plane leaves the ground with an empty seat, that potential revenue is lost forever.

Airlines frequently offer Web-only fares, some of which they announce to subscribers through free e-mail newsletters for which travelers can sign up at airline Web sites.

Some sites, such as CheapTickets (www.cheaptickets.com), have prices that often are as low, or lower, than Expedia, Travelocity or Orbitz. For example, a May 30 check at CheapTickets for a round-trip fare from Dulles Airport outside of Washington to San Francisco on June 5, returning on June 8, showed a low fare of $310.95 on American Trans Air. For that same day, Expedia showed a low fare of $450 on American Trans Air and Northwest Airlines.

Discount options

"White label" sites may be even lower. On sites such as Hotwire (www.hotwire.com) you enter dates of travel and other preferences, and the site returns a fare. The term "white label" is used because you won't know which airline, or the flight times, until you buy the ticket.

"The lowest prices for domestic flights within the United States with less than seven days advance are almost always from 'white label' online consolidator ticket agencies, except (when) occasionally there's an airline direct-sale special that's as cheap or a little bit cheaper," Hasbrouck said.

There are exceptions

Southwest Airlines (www.iflyswa.com) does not post fares on any site but its own. Fares for some other discount airlines, such as Jet Blue Airways (www.jetblue.com), are more abundant on their own sites rather than on the major third-party travel sites.

If you are traveling on business, your corporate travel desk might be able to work out a better fare for you than a travel Web site can.

"Many corporations have negotiated discounted air fare rates, which they track when an itinerary is booked through a designated travel agency," said Valerie Estep, president of air fares auditing firm Topaz International, Inc. "You might not get that rate if you book the flight on your own."

What about a travel agent? When it comes to leisure travel, some agents may have access to air-hotel packages that are lower than what might be available online.

Yet most travel agents do not compete on price alone.

"What you get is our expertise," said travel agent Prefontaine. "If your son in Boston needs to use your credit card to travel, you might have to go to an airline's city ticket office to make that arrangement. I'd bet that amount of time you would spend taking care of that on your own would be worth more than $35 to you."

If you do decide to book online, though, be prepared to do a lot of pointing and clicking.

"Sometimes, finding the lowest fare really is a craps shoot," said Estep.

"There's no 'magic URL' where everything is cheaper," Hasbrouck said. "You can expect being a 'do-it-yourself' travel agent to be more difficult and to require more time and skill than paying a professional to do the job for you."