Touring the Top Travel Sites

Travelocity.com recently enhanced the site with a Business Travel Center. Features include Express Search, which allows users to search for flights by date, time, and specific airline; Repeat A Trip, which allows travelers to design and store up to 25 itineraries for flights, car rentals and hotel stays; Mobile Solutions, which brings real-time travel information and booking capabilities to Internet-enabled cell phones or wireless hand-held devices; Flight Status, which lets travelers monitor arrival and departure status, gate and baggage information and weather reports; Flight Paging, which alerts travelers to information that affects their schedules; and a currency converter.

SideStep lets PC users running Internet Explorer download a plug-in that searches for flights, hotel rooms and rental cars while Expedia or Travelocity hunts for the same information in an adjacent window. Customers are then forwarded to airline, hotel and car rental Web sites to complete the transactions."That lets the suppliers retain greater control of the customer experience and cuts out the fees that they pay to distribution systems," explains SideStep CEO Brian Barth.

At the newly redesigned Business Travel channel on Hoover's Online www.hoovers.com,
a combination of top-flight travel information and tools from companies like ontheroad.com, trip.com
and wcities.com make the site an excellent one-stop information resource for travelers. Features include a booking engine, through trip.com, for air, car and hotel; city guides to 100 destinations worldwide; FlightTracker, one of trip.comís most popular features, which allows users to check the
status of flights between major U.S. cities and minimizes time spent waiting at the airport; maps, driving directions; e-mail travel alerts for specials on fares and hotel rooms, and an online copy center sponsored by Mimeo.com that can print, bind and deliver important documents directly
from any PC application.

Expedia.com© has recently launched an impressive new Business Tools section. The Travel Arranger feature allows a planner, with the travelerís permission, to purchase travel within the account of the individual who is actually taking the trip. (The traveler can access
personal itineraries and make changes at any time.) The Repeat a Trip features allow travelers to book the same flight, hotel and rental car from a previous trip, and to synchronize itineraries with the personal calendars on their desktop or laptop computers. These new features build on Mileage-Miner, a service for managing various frequency programs, and Expedia To GoTM™ mobile services. Business travelers make up about one third of the customer base of Expedia, which developed the technology used by American Expressí corporate travel booking engine, said
John Pollard, director of business travel and mobile services.

YOUPriceit.com lets con-sumers bid on airline tickets for domestic and international travel. Travelers enter where they want to go and how much they want to pay. YOUPriceit.com then searches airlines and participating vendors to try and match (or beat) the bid. With the use of contracted fares, consolidators and other discounts, YOUPriceit.com may save the
traveler as much as 75 percent on airline tickets.