When to use and avoid Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia

by Grant Martin on

Online travel agents like Orbitz, Priceline, Travelocity and Expedia are handy, touchy-feely tools that many Internet users find useful when booking hotel and airline reservations. It’s important to keep in mind, though, that these tools are travel agents, and just like the travel agent down at the local strip mall, they take a commission from any booking you make. Conversely, since airlines control inventory, they should have the best idea of what prices and volumes they have and 99% of the time will offer the best price. Most airlines even have best price guarantees to promote this.

There are, however, instances in which an online travel agent are useful. In addition to the easy-to-use interfaces, areas in which the TA might help are if they were to:

  • Have negotiated a discount (ie, corporate or consolidator) with the airline. In this case you need to pay particular attention to the fare class that you’re booked in; many consolidator tickets, for example, some from airfare.com or your local Chinatown TA don’t qualify for frequent flyer miles.
  • Combine a series of tickets into one itinerary. For example, last April when I was trying to find a cheap ticket to Buenos Aires I checked all of the canonical search engines and could only find tickets for 1100$. Orbitz, however came up with a price that was 300$ cheaper. Why? Because they found a fare sale between Washington DC and Argentina on Delta and nested it into a regular Northwest DTW-WAS 100$ flight. Result? Net savings of three hundred bucks. Typically, standard airlines wont search and book outside of their service, so their websites can’t do this.

If you’re really comfortable with the Expedia or Travelocity interface (I know, some of the airline websites are kind of lame), try using them to do your basic fare searching. If you find a standard ticket from point A to B on one airline, bite the bullet, go to that airline’s website and book the ticket there. It should save you a few bucks in the end.

10 tips for smarter flying


Best Rate Guarantees could get you a free hotel room

by Grant Martin on

With fierce competition in the travel market, websites are increasingly turning to gimmicks, tricks and guarantees to hook surfers into booking with them. Most frequent these days is the low price guarantee, where a particular airline or hotel chain will guarantee that their prices are the lowest — and if you find a lower fare they’ll either refund you the price of the booking or give you some sort of voucher.

In the case of most airlines, this is particularly useful because they control the supply and pricing of the tickets; therefore, obviously, their website has the lowest price. But the hotel industry hasn’t come as far. Their innumerable combinations of hotel rooms, rates, locations and discounts often create loopholes which one website will often miss in comparison to another.

So if you can find this lower fare and a third party website that guarantees that they have the “lowest prices”, you can book the cheaper fare, cry foul to that website and essentially get that room for free.

What sort of website would do that? Triprewards, for one has a best rate guarantee, and I’m told they’re quite disciplined about reading and responding to claims.

And how do find the cheapest rates out on the market? Well, I’d start at the Best Rate Guarantee blog, where a generous member of the travel community has an ongoing list of BRG valid deals. Make sure you read his introductory posts that tell you exactly how and when to book your hotel rooms, and you’ll be on your way to free rooms in no time!

Find out what’s on the exact opposite side of the world

by Aaron Hotfelder on

As a youngster, I was often told that if I dug a hole deep enough, I would eventually find myself in China. I tried “digging a hole to China” a couple times, but I’d always give up as soon as my shovel would hit the bottom of the sandbox. Needless to say, I was not bright as a little boy.

Through the magic of the internets, we’re now easily able to discover just where we’d pop out if we really dug a hole through the center of the Earth. This map is handy for finding out a rough approximation of the antipodal (opposite) point of any place in the world, while this one is better for a bit more precision.

So if you were to dig a hole to the exact opposite side of the Earth, would you really end up in China? Not unless you live in certain parts of Chile or Argentina. In my case, I’d need to bring my swimming trunks, and so would almost all residents of the continental US, as we’d end up in the Indian Ocean between southern Africa and Australia.

Somehow, the phrase “dig a hole to somewhere between southern Africa and Australia” just doesn’t work.

But if you do dig a hole to China, you might expect to see….

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Booking Your Next Virtual Tour in Cyberspace

by Anna Brones on

We’ve talked about virtual tourism before, but I didn’t realize how far some companies would take the idea until I came across an old article on a virtual travel agency in the French newspaper Liberation.

Synthravels is not your average travel agency. Instead of virtual tours of exotic sites around the globe, these guys go one step farther: extensive and in-depth tours in the wide world of cyberspace. What exactly does that mean? The travel agency offers their tours in the online gaming world, and opening it up to those of us who are less-experienced, less-inclined or just plain old technologically impaired. This is the agency to go to if you want your next travels to take you into the realms of Second Life, World of Warcraft and Sims Online. That’s right, just imagine your next tour could entail no packing, no missing a flight, no jet-lag, and most definitely no traveler’s diarrhea (unless the online gaming world makes you queasy.)

I’ve got to give it to them, as skeptical as I was, they make a good case, reminding us that cyberspace provides the adventurous with an undiscovered frontier, open for exploration. In fact, as geeky as it might seem, the concept of the agency is a creation of Mario Gerosa, a travel journalist and once the Senior Editor of Condé Nast Traveler Italy. They’re based in Milan, but all you need to get in touch is your good ‘ole computer, so you leave your suitcase in the closet.

Synthtravels.com

Redrawing the map of the US

by Aaron Hotfelder on

The brain-child of the CommonCensus Map Project, the map to the right shows some alternative boundaries to US states, ones based more on culture than politics. To draw the boundaries, the website is polling US citizens throughout the country in order to find out how far various major cities’ “spheres of influence” extend. Here’s more from the “About” section of the website:

“By combining the votes from people all over the country, the CommonCensus Map Project is showing how the country is really organized. People vote about which city they belong to, what they consider to be their local area, and which major city most influences their area, as well as what areas they most identify with personally.”

Be sure to check out the National Map (click to magnify), which was drawn using the input of tens of thousands of votes. There are also similar maps of the regions surrounding New York City and San Francisco.

Want to give your input? Go the main page and have at it.

[Link via Cartophilia.]