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TESTING THE WEB'S TOP SIX TRAVEL SITESOnline airline services seem like they're made for a business traveler in a hurry. Log on, punch in your itinerary, and back comes a list of the cheapest fares available from every airline. It's one-stop shopping, right? Well, not exactly, as our test of six popular Web travel sites found. You're probably better off if you look at several of these shopping services. They rarely all quoted the same price, even when we punched in the same information during our tests, and the difference can mean hundreds of dollars in savings for you. What's more, the itinerary for the so-called best fares on each site often varied considerably. Flights may leave hours before or after the time you request. In the perpetual-motion world of modern airline prices, which seem to change minute to minute, you might miss a great buy on one site while searching another site. To get the lowdown on low fares, we looked at unrestricted, round-trip offerings between some major U.S. cities on six popular Web services: Biztravel.com, Expedia.com, PreviewTravel.com, TheTrip.com (which provides travel data for Business Week Online), ITN.com, and Travelocity.com. We looked at fares, routes, and how easy or hard it is to use the site. Our comparison, conducted in the last week of October, assumed that you wouldn't book early enough to get an economy fare. It also assumed that you were leaving on Tuesday, Nov. 3, at around 6 a.m., and returning Wednesday around 5 p.m. The results:
New York to Chicago to New York Runner-up: Expedia came up with a $1,146 fare, but it's pretty inconvenient. You'd leave Newark on AmericaWest at 6:40 a.m., stop in Columbus for an hour, then arrive in O'Hare at 11:00 a.m. On the way back, you would take U.S. Airways from Chicago at 6:41 p.m., connect in Pittsburgh, and land at White Plains airport at 10:52 p.m. Also-rans: TheTrip and ITN came in at $1,207, offering the same direct flight on United from Newark to O'Hare. BizTravel's $1,451 fare was the priciest. Travelocity did not come up with any unrestricted fares. Instead it offered a coach fare of $656 on American Transair.
Dallas to Washington to Dallas Runner-up: PreviewTravel's $1,370 fare on American has you fly at 6:15 a.m. from Dallas, and it gets you to National at 9:54 a.m. But you have to fly out a couple of hours earlier the next day from National, at 3:25 p.m. Also-Rans: TheTrip, ITN, and BizTravel all came in with fares near $1,450. Expedia's itinerary, however, was a pricey $1,562 on US Airways, and it stops in Pittsburgh for an hour on your way back the next day.
Runner-up: Expedia's $1,665 fare has you leaving Boston at 7 a.m. on AmericaWest, arriving at LAX at 11:30 am. You take the red-eye the next day at 10:10 p.m., arriving back in Boston at 8:00 a.m. Also-rans: Preview and BizTravel came up with fares that ran neck-and-neck at $2,010 and $2,014, respectively. ITN and TheTrip are the big losers here, with fares at $2,624. Why the big differences? One reason is that buying an airline ticket is like buying stocks these days -- the prices are changing every minute. In fact, says Antoine Toffa, president of TheTrip, airlines file more than 100,000 changes a day on domestic routes. That may explain why BizTravel's selections were among the costliest for the three trips. Edward Hardebeck, director of development for the site, says this is a random occurrence. "There is no inherent reason why we should come up with anything higher. These are all published fares," he says. That's a fair point. We surveyed the sites consecutively -- the way a business traveler might do it -- rather than simultaneously. In a similar test conducted by Business Week Online in September, Expedia came up with the costliest fares. Another possible reason is that the services don't all tap into the same databases. Expedia and BizTravel get their information from WorldSpan; Travelocity taps Sabre; while TheTrip, ITN, and PreviewTravel all use Apollo, albeit with separate software interfaces. So it's hardly a surprise that TheTrip and ITN often gave the same fares, carriers, and routes. NO DISCRIMINATION. Less clear is the role of the airlines, which own all or part of these sites. AMR Corp., the parent of American Airlines, has a big stake in Travelocity. Northwest and Continental own WorldSpan, and United operates Apollo indirectly. The sites aren't subject to laws that prohibit travel agents and computerized reservation systems from rearranging the information to make one airline's options appear to match your travel crtieria better than another. To their credit, though, there was no clear pattern of discrimination. So how should you play this game? Make sure you query at least two sites using different databases. As a backup, be sure to sign up for free E-mail offers that tell you about cheaper rates to your destination that pop up later. You'll have to put up with some junk mail, but you won't have that gnawing feeling that you're missing a better deal. Some general gripes: Each site makes you fill out a time-wasting profile that lets the site send out those free E-mail messages -- but also, presumably, to gather marketing information. There are also some vexing individual quirks. For example, Travelocity's site is a headache if you change destinations. You have to go back to the home page and start again instead of just typing in a new city. PreviewTravel needs to condense its tedious series of screens into one. ITN's and Expedia's sites, by contrast, are a breeze to use and provide quick answers. That's more than you can say for some travel agents.
By Jeremy Quittner, staff reporter, Business Week Online RELATED ITEMS
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Updated Nov. 5, 1998 by bwwebmaster
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