Cheap Tickets & Fare Tracking

How do you know if you've overpaid?
Is there any remedy?
Is there any way to check?
You want cheap tickets, right?
Here's some new software.
A report:

Several innovative companies have been working to improve information about (and access to) low airfares in recent years. We’ve seen the widespread acceptance of aggregators like Kayak, SideStep (reviewed here last year), and the growth of fare watching/predicting services like FareCompare and FareCast.

So what’s next?

The tech world went ga-ga over Yapta (Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant) recently. And if it’s the real deal, then it could be a great service.

Unlike existing fare alert tools, Yapta also tracks the fares on your trip after you’ve purchased, in order to take advantage of low-fare guarantees and fare-drop voucher policies. If your ticket’s fare drops after you’ve purchased, you get a refund in the form of a voucher. The site is in closed beta right now, and was supposed to open up for public beta this week.

The idea is a good one. One possible snag: Not every airline (or booking site) guarantees their fares in case of a fare drop. If more than 24 hours have passed since the time of purchase, getting a fare-drop voucher is increasingly rare. (For example, United still does it, but US Airways apparently abandoned their fare-drop policy after they merged with America West.)

Perhaps the best of all possible worlds would be 1) using Farecast to get a reading on whether the current fare is a good one, and whether to wait or buy now, then 2) using FareCompare to get e-mail alerts when fares drop (even hours before those fares even go on sale), and finally 3) using Yapta to track fares after you’ve pulled the trigger, so you can collect vouchers or refunds if fares drop further. Sounds like a great combination to me. (If these three companies merge, e-mail me for the address where you can send the finder’s fee for brokering the deal.)

I certainly appreciate all the effort, venture capital, and sheer computing power that goes into giving consumers better access to low airfares. It’s a big reason why airfares are as relatively low as they are today, despite recent fare hikes in light of high fuel costs.

But I’d love to see similar effort put into tracking hotel rates. I know, there’s more variation between hotels, and then more variation between rooms within each property, so it’s harder to make comparisons, but I’m sure there are some clever, entrepreneurial programmers who can figure out a way.