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Why Trip Advisor
is so cool!
If you research
air and hotels online use a dedicated portal site like Trip
Advisor.
Trip Advisor’s
side-by-side comparisons of the mammoth booking sites and its
no-holds-barred comments by travelers are honest information that
will help you make better informed buying decisions.
I have always
admired their user-friendly interface, but I never used it with a
conscious goal until recently. A number of things that I found
invaluable impressed me.
1.) Airline
Rate Comparisons
When you
choose a city for information there are links to the Big 3 booking
engines (that’s not the impressive part) but when you want to
check the fares you just use the drop down list for your departure
city and click the booking engine link you’d like and Trip Advisor
passes your departure and destination city through. Then you just
need to enter the dates into the separate sites for a rate quote.
This helps to eliminate a few of the repetitive steps in the
process of online shopping.
2.) Hotel
Research
Trip Advisor
offers a list of hotels in any city based on a user popularity
index. In a single click, you can get either:
- Honest,
unedited comments from real travelers who have been there as
well as guidebook reviews, articles and other comments on the
property
- A
comparison of rates from the major booking sites
The user
comments came in handy when I was trying to choose between two
hotels in Madrid, suggested by the conference I was attending.
Both of them operated by the same company and both three-star
properties (albeit one at the low, the other at the high end of
that range). One of them received uniformly bad ratings from Trip
Advisor’s posters while the other received raves. Identifying the
nearby attractions was also useful.
Their Quick
Check search feature is a very handy tool for comparing rates from
the major booking sites for each specific hotel. Side-by-side
quotes from Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity allow you to compare
price and availability differentials in a glance.
Each booking
engine had dramatically different rates and availability based on
their negotiated contract. After you choose which hotel you
prefer, my suggestion is to go to the hotel or chain directly as
you will usually get a better rate. Naturally, the Big 3 need to
make a buck from the transaction and it shows, overwhelmingly.
Besides, most hotels guarantee you won’t find lower rates online
than they offer themselves.
Trip
Advisor is a fantastic research tool for air and hotel plans.
By
leading people to tons of great information users can browse,
explore, discover, and then go to the source. No middleman, no
extra fees - just raw data from which to make your own choice.
Watch for them to become even more dominate in the travel sector
as they expand more specialty content to complement their current
major player only offerings.
Cultural
Travels serves your leisure travel and tour needs.
With over 1,800 specialized tour operators, side-by-side
comparisons are just a couple of clicks away. You cannot find a
better reference source for planning the holiday of your dreams
than CulturalTravels.com. Yes, I am biased, but I have done the
comparisons. I encourage you to do so as well and I welcome your
comments and suggestions.
Information is after all the Internet’s great promise and portal sites are
the best place to find quality resources. Without the frustration
of sorting through mostly irrelevant search engine results,
dedicated portal sites are the Internet’s future. Watch for
consolidation to increase as sites struggle to find viable revenue
models and Darwinian principles thrive.
 |
 I
did a little travel planning the other day that left me mostly shaking
my head in confusion.
Very simply, I went
online to check out the price and availability of a round trip flight
from San Francisco
to Madrid and a multi-leg air trip from San Francisco to Madrid, with a
stopover in London. I also wanted to check out hotels in Madrid.
In my past life I
was a travel agent and I know my way around the industry, the
terminology and as we would hope, the Internet. So, if I ran into
differences that left me amazed, you can imagine how they would have
confounded the typical traveler.
First, I went to the
Big 3 online booking engines, Orbitz, Expedia and Travelocity, to price
out the two separate itineraries. I also went directly to Iberia and
American (the two airlines who code share these specific flights) for
the round trip quote and British Airways for the multi-city price.
The quotes were for
the following itineraries:
-
A round trip San
Francisco – Madrid flight
-
San Francisco –
Madrid – London – San Francisco
The flights did not
have a 7-day advance but did have a Saturday night stay.
The table below
shows the resulting prices – and their astonishing differences.
|
|
Orbitz |
Expedia |
Travelocity |
Iberia |
AA |
BA |
|
Lowest Offered |
$552 |
$902 |
$1538 |
$563 |
$2231 |
|
|
Airline Specific |
$605 |
$902 |
$916 |
$563 |
$2231 |
|
|
Multi-city |
$702 |
$1,505 |
$2001 |
|
|
$1,991 |
As you can see from
the table, Travelocity, our Goliath for editorial criticisms for the
last few years is still plundering the unsuspecting traveler with high
prices and hiding their lower fares. For all the anti-trust hullabaloo,
Orbitz, owned by a number of airlines, is in this comparison, truly the
online travelers best friend.
Price and user
interface comparisons for the Big 3 Booking Engines:
Orbitz – best all
around
-
Showed lots of
choices and showed lowest prices first
-
Multiple cities easy
to enter and options easy to read
-
Displayed
information, times, flights and carriers very easy to read
-
Code Shares easy to
spot
-
Display was bundled
and you cannot chose separate outbound and return flights and have to
scroll through all options.
I loved that fact
that Orbitz offered flights from a number of different airlines for the
multi-city itinerary. Normally for the best fare, you need to stick to
one airline and their partners. Orbitz appeared to book each segment as
a separate leg combining the best times and the best rate regardless of
the carrier. A very novel approach, your typical travel agent could not
do that and get the same rate!
Expedia –
mediocre
-
Displayed
information, times, flights and carriers very easy to read
-
Code shares not
apparent
-
Display was bundled
and you cannot chose separate outbound and return flights but have to
scroll through all options.
Travelocity – the
big loser
-
Prices were
outrageous and did not show lowest first
-
Only when requesting
a specific airline,
Iberia,
was I able to get a lower price
-
Multiple entries
needed to find, if even possible, the best deal
-
Display easy to read
-
Display was not
bundled and I could mix and match flights
-
Code Shares obvious
Next, I went to
individual airline sites to see what fares would be.
Iberia booked
directly (flights code shared with AA)
- Slightly hard to
read display
- Small icons
indicated code share but needed to be clicked to reveal partner
airline
- Could not search
for multiple segments
- Was able to
choose first outbound flight and then return separately
*AA
booked directly
(flights code shared with
Iberia)
- Display horrible
to read
- No option of
searching by price only schedule
- No per segment
lowest fare shown
- Pricing not
available until you were finished booking
- No chance to look
for the lowest fare
*Be aware - In
this instance, the rate on American Airlines for the exact same flights
code shared with Iberia was $2231.00, by booking with Iberia the rate
was $563.87. American Airlines was nearly 4x more!
The Internet is
great for research—no service involved. However, if you are stuck,
expect the same level of service you received when you made the booking.
If you know what
specific airline you want, the best online rates are always direct. A
hint; you can always call the airline first and get help with times and
fares and see if you can get a better fare, or additional perks by
booking online.
As always, I
still believe a good and trustworthy travel agent is a busy traveler’s
best friend. When it comes to knowing how to get the best rate, a travel
agent has the most thorough information and the advantage: their years
of experience and access to the newly released Web only fares.
There is no
longer the worry that agents will sell a higher fare to earn a larger
profit. Since the loss of commissions, most agent charge a service fee
and as in all industries, if the client does not feel they received the
best bargain, they will look for another provider the next time around.
Great as the
Internet is, it is not as perfect as the hype would have you believe. As
with any purchase, brick and mortar or online, do your homework. The
great independent online portal sites like Trip Advisor and Cultural
Travels can help. Then contact the final supplier directly.
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