Some three weeks ago, Farecast announced a new cherry picking service of the best deals available from a list of 26 towns in the US. The idea behind it is to have a computer compare average ticket price to a destination, and try to find a date in the coming future with a significantly lower price. Kayak offers a similar service called ‘Buzz’, based on previous searches made on the same route by other searchers.
Wegolo, a reservation system for low cost flights, offers a ‘hot & cold’ tool that allows customers to search for a low cost flight in European destinations based on their forecasted temperature for your date. Skyscanner, a low cost airlines scanner, offers an entire month (compared with 1 day in most services) fares preview for a specific route, allowing customers with high flexibility to better choose their trip date on a desired destination.
These are all great gadgets, some are even practical. Yet one question must be asked: for your flight- do these services go and find the best price, or do they just find another good fare? Is not finding the best price all the time is the core of travel search engine? If the answer to this question is ‘no’, then what is the core of travel search engines?
Good Question – but where’s the answer? And what happened to that March release date?
Jon
Hey Jon,
An early version of the site is on the air at: http://www.etrip.nl
The answer to the question depends on the respondent.
If it is Kayak/Farecast/Sidestep – their answer should be: ‘Our job is to organize info from selected travel sites and help make the purchase process easier and faster.’
If you ask us, we would have a different answer. More like:
‘Our job is to find the best prices available on the web, whether we get paid for it (by the airline/travel agency) or not.
We work for the customer, not for the selling website.’
If this statement sounds bogus, try to count how many times would a search in Kayak actually send you to the website of airlines like KLM, Air France, Cathay Pacific, SAS and others.
I would even be more precise:
Look for an Easyjet flight through Kayak.com. Then look for it at Kayak.co.uk.
What is the difference in the sites offered for this flight? why is it there? and what does it tell us about the current market of Travel search engines?
As the answer for these questions is logic, I would leave an open question:
Is there a room for change there?
OK, let’s imagine you create a search engine that finds the best fare, regardless of commission. Everyone comes to use it. Then the airlines that pay commission stop doing so, because they don’t need to. But you need revenue for al the servers to power this huge traffic, so you start charging for top position, or whatever, to make some money. We are back to a distorted picture.
Interesting though.
Cheers