Cheap Tickets News: July 2008

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Restrictions On New Airfare Deals

From the New York Times:

The best bargains tend to be found midweek and come with restrictions. American’s sale doesn’t include the Thanksgiving holiday period, Nov. 22 to 30, for example, and it requires a two-day minimum stay. Air France is limiting its deals to departures between Sept. 1 and Oct. 29 with a Saturday night stay requirement. The JetBlue deals require a seven-day advance purchase and must be booked by Aug. 6. Travel to the Northeast and Florida must take place between Sept. 3 and Dec. 17, while travel to the Caribbean, Mexico and Western states must be between Aug. 11 and Nov. 1. Although these may not be rock-bottom deals, the sales are significantly better than some of the lofty prices travelers have been facing this summer. They also may be a signal that consumers have reached a limit in terms of how much they’re willing to pay in price hikes.

“I think the writing’s on the wall that the economy is pretty soft.” said Tom Parsons, chief executive of Bestfares.com, a discount travel Web site that tracks airfare changes. “And travel is a very discretionary item.”

Despite capacity cuts, Mr. Parsons said he expected to see more deals to leisure destinations like the Caribbean, Mexico and Florida after Aug. 15, when children begin to go back to school and family travel starts to wane. “As we go into the fall,” he said, “airlines will be begging for people to get on the planes.” He is especially keeping his eye on Southwest Airlines, which he says hasn’t had a systemwide sale since Memorial Day weekend and is ready for one.

Airfare Deals

From the New York Times:

American Airlines and its regional affiliate, American Eagle, have been offering some surprisingly low fares to the Caribbean, the Bahamas, Mexico and Bermuda in a sale that ends on Thursday. The deals, which are good for travel between Sept. 2 and Dec. 10, include round-trip tickets as low as $152 from Miami to Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; $178 from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Kingston, Jamaica; and $246 from New York to Bermuda, not including taxes and fees.

On Monday, JetBlue announced its annual fall sale, with one-way fares as low as $79 between Austin, Tex., and Fort Lauderdale; $109 between Boston and Chicago; and $169 between Long Beach, Calif., and Washington. Most of the sales, though, are out of Kennedy Airport in New York, including one-way fares from $149 to Denver; $155 to Cancún; $59 to Charlotte, N.C.; and $159 to Las Vegas.

Also, just last week, Air France extended the book-by date of a late-summer and early-fall sale to Europe to Aug. 5. Round-trip fares include New York to Paris from $628, Philadelphia to Madrid from $706 and Boston to Prague from $720, including fuel surcharges, but not taxes and security fees.

Rating Quality

From the New York Times:

SEVERAL travel sites have recently made upgrades to help put flights in context of the overall flying experience. Travelocity has been working on color-coding for nonstop (green) flights and connecting (red) flights. It also offers “fare notes” in the margins of search results announcing changes or highlighting particulars of a flight — like United’s new fee for a second checked bag or Delta’s free curbside check-in — to help travelers make informed decisions.

In a new Traveler Update section, Orbitz provides maps that show flight delays for individual airports, the pace of highway traffic near major airports and average wait times at airport security checkpoints. And Itasoftware.com has long let travelers view flights graphically to see which ones have stopovers and points out long layovers or tight connections in a “warnings” column.

Travelers already cross-reference airfare searches with information from sites like www.tsa.gov for security checkpoint wait times and Flightstats.com, which lets travelers compare the timeliness record for particular flights. But InsideTrip is the first site to find a way to pull all this data together and present it in a comprehensive way.

Inside Trip.com

From the New York Times:

Enter InsideTrip.com, a new travel site scheduled to arrive in test form on Tuesday. Headed up by Dave Pelter, a 17-year veteran of the travel industry who most recently had a hand in inventive sites like Farecast.com and Yapta.com, InsideTrip.com promises to take airfare searches to a new level.

For each search, InsideTrip provides not just fares but also evaluations of what Mr. Pelter calls 12 “pain points.” These include the amount of legroom in a cabin, how often the flight is on time, the aircraft type (larger jets get higher ratings), how crowded a specific flight typically is and if you can walk to your connection. It even considers how long it usually takes to get through the security checkpoint nearest the gate.

Each flight is given an overall trip quality rating, which is displayed on the right side of the search results as a score out of 100. There are also Consumer Reports-style symbols rating speed, comfort and ease in five levels, from poor to excellent.

For example, a recent test search on InsideTrip.com for round-trip flights from New York to Denver pulled up a list by price. The cheapest option — a $310 flight on American Airlines that took more than six hours each way, including a change of planes in the massive Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport — had a trip quality score of 62. Speed and comfort were rated “very good,” and ease of travel as “good.”

The top pick, highlighted by a purple flowerlike symbol, was a nonstop flight on Frontier Airlines for just $12 more that offered more legroom, less travel time and had a better lost-bags rating. Its overall trip quality score was 89, with “excellent” speed and comfort marks and “very good” ease of travel.