Thursday, April 2, 2009

Innovation rages on in Meta-Search

The smack-down in travel meta-search between Fly.com, TripAdvisor.com and market leader Kayak.com with consumers so far emerging as the big winners. The emerging players (Fly and TA) are continuing to push out new functionality that is offering consumers new and interesting ways to search for airfares.

Today, Fly.com released a great new feature that allows users (once they have searched) to easily explore how changing adjusting their travel dates can save them money. Talk about a feature that is right for the times! Fly.com allows users to easily compare air fares on multiple days. Better still, it enables users to compare airfares across months at a time based on a variable trip duration. Finally, a consumer can simply say that they want to go to Los Angeles for 4 days sometime over the next 4 months and Fly.com will show the user a multitude of travel dates with associated fares - it enables consumers to easily make trade-offs between flying on say, a Saturday in mid-May vs. the end of spring break. And, a user can even declare a fixed outbound or return day - perfect for those trips when you know exactly when you have to leave or return but are somewhat flexible on one end of the trip or the other. Finally, Fly.com has made it easy to see if staying over a Saturday night really makes a difference or not! Or it may yield the perfect excuse to stay an extra day on that business trip to South Florida in January...

Bravo, fly.com!

1 comment:

  1. These are definitely the kinds of tools we need. Was sitting next to a guy on a plane yesterday, and he was complaining about how many hours it took him to search for a flight online. Even with metasearch, if you are cash-starved and need a bargain, flight and hotel searches can be yeoman's chores. (Who is yeoman, anyway, dunno, but...). It is clear that with the epidemic of new fees and services, what metasearch and the travel industry sorely need is a huge influx of simplicity and tools that create order from the current chaos.

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