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Fall Sites Ready for Takeoff
Access Magazine · October 14, 2000

Kalan Clark didn't want to pay a lot for a plane ticket to visit her sister in Phoenix. She logged on to the Internet but couldn't find the kind of deal she was seeking.

"I visited Travelocity and a couple of airline Web sites to see what I could find," says the Des Moines, Iowa, marketing manager. "But the best I could get was a fare of about $350. I thought I could do better."

She could. Clark checked out a new site called Hotwire, which touts airline tickets at a 40 percent discount. (The site plans to offer hotel rooms and rental cars later this fall.) At Hotwire, suppliers bid against each other for your business. The hidden cost: The site restricts your ability to control routing, collect frequent flier miles, select the carrier or specify the exact time of departure. You don't know the airline or the flight times until after you buy your ticket. What you see is the lowest price available.

Still, Clark was willing to buy. She found a fare of $208 on American Airlines - the published advance purchase fare was $410 - and bought it on the spot.

"I was absolutely blown away by it," she says. "I liked it better than priceline.com, because they showed me the fare up front. I didn't have to guess how much to pay. I didn't mind the restrictions, because I knew I was getting the cheapest fare. I think this is the best thing to hit the Internet."

This fall a new crop of travel sites promises to help you plan a trip more easily than ever and save money in the process. The upstarts also put technology that used to be available only to professional travel agents at your fingertips. At no time since the mid-1990s, when the first online booking sites appeared, have there been as many innovations in Web travel.

"There's no question that this fall we'll be seeing several new sites that will change the way we buy travel," says Henry Harteveldt, a senior analyst for Forrester Research. "They're making travel more convenient, less expensive and less confusing than ever."

These startups have the potential to transform the way we plan our vacations and business trips. But, like anything new to the Internet, the sites don't always work the way they're supposed to, currently offering limited selections or more restrictions than the average traveler would deem acceptable. The most high-profile of this season's Web sites, Orbitz, even postponed its autumn launch, leaving Internet users to surf a test site from which you can't book a ticket.

But people who have tested these new travel dot-coms are enthusiastic. Talk to Bobbie Hamilton. The Van Nuys, Calif., executive assistant was looking for inexpensive plane tickets from Los Angeles to New York in November, but her travel agent quoted her a price of $365 per person with a stopover. "I really wanted a nonstop flight, and I thought the price was a little high," she says.

So Hamilton searched on the Internet. She checked with Cheap Tickets, OneTravel.com, Travelocity.com and priceline.com. Then she discovered a new site called Savvio.com, which deals in airline and cruise tickets. After she typed in her desired itinerary, the Web page displayed a choice of flights, the published prices, a ticker showing the changing prices, the number of seats available and the time left to make the purchase. When the price was right, she pushed the "buy now" button and saved $50 per passenger (and she found a nonstop itinerary). The trick is to buy the lowest-price ticket before someone else does.

Savvio.com balances the fact that airline and cruise tickets are "perishable" - once the plane or boat leaves, they're essentially worth nothing - with your need for a last-minute bargain. Think of it as playing chicken online. You have a limited time to buy a ticket, and the supplier has a limited time to sell it.

Although an early look at Savvio.com showed that its itineraries were extremely limited, the new site was enough to make a believer out of Hamilton. "Next time I have to go somewhere, Savvio will be the first site I check," she says.

One fall upstart, eGulliver.com, is improving on travel request sites such as iWant.com and Respond.com. eGulliver.com works in much the same way as its rivals: It connects a travel specialist with a vacationer. But eGulliver.com promises to do so in a way that's smarter and quicker by using proprietary technology to match detailed profiles of travelers with those of travel experts.

Terri Maldonado, a cruise specialist in West Linn, Ore., checked out eGulliver.com before it launched and then applied to become one of the site's travel pros. She says she likes the way the system works, not just from the matchmaking perspective, but also in terms of the way it helps you book a vacation. "This is going to put travelers in touch with specialists that match their desire, but the personalization is going to be much better than before," she says. The net result is that online users will find the vacation they want quicker than ever, she says.

eGulliver.com doesn't just try to hook up a traveler with the right agent. It also specializes in complex itineraries. Booking a round-the-world vacation or a two-week safari has been difficult on the Internet because most travel sites can't or won't handle a schedule with a lot of stopovers. But new technology developed by eGulliver.com could change that, letting you devise a more complicated vacation and then consult with a travel agent through the Internet.

Another upcoming site, FairAir.com, will allow you to buy a ticket and then exchange it if your schedule changes. The company promotes the site, slated to launch early next year, as "the exchange for transferable airline tickets." Consider FairAir.com as more of a secondary market for airline tickets, aimed mostly at business travelers and those people whose schedules can change at a moment's notice.

At FairAir.com, buyers must be found for your tickets, which could mean that you won't always get the results you want. Note, too, that there's no escaping the change fees: FairAir.com will charge a commission for each transaction. For a vacationer, it may be easier to negotiate directly with an airline to get credit or pay a fee to change a ticket.

If you're looking for a bargain on a hotel and you're willing to bid for it, a new site called Revelex.com may be the way to go. The site publishes room rates up front, taking the guesswork out of how much you should bid. When bidding on a room, you see the current bids of other customers, plus current daily rates of the hotels. It is possible to bid below that rate, but less likely that a hotel will take the bid. "If you bid $75 for a $200 room, you'll be sitting there the rest of your life," says Daniel Karten, Revelex.com executive vice president of marketing. "If you're fair and reasonable, you'll get a quick response."

Once you log on to the site, you can make an offer on a room, which is seen by the hotel you want to stay in. The site handles hotel inventory as if it were a Wall Street stock. As occupancy rates fluctuate, the hotel may decide to sell you a room or not. If a group of tourists suddenly cancels, for example, your odds of getting a room suddenly go up.

"We're giving consumers a real-time view of the market and the ability to name their own price, and we're giving vendors a chance to get rid of open rooms," Karten says.

You can avoid the bidding route and book rooms directly at Revelex.com. The site will also handle car rentals and airline tickets.

Not all of the sites took off as planned this fall. As this story went to press, one of the most ambitious projects delayed its launch until next year. Orbitz, which is funded by five airlines - American, Continental, Delta, Northwest and United - had promised to effectively combine the offerings of many companies, providing you with a wider selection of airline tickets, cruises, hotel rooms and rental cars. It also planned to offer Internet-only deals that were previously available only by visiting other airline or hotel sites.

Amid mounting pressure from Orbitz's would-be competitors and close government antitrust scrutiny, the company moved its launch until June 2001. Officials issued a statement that the site required further user testing.

But you don't have to wait until next year for Orbitz to go live to take advantage of the technology behind it. Although you can't book a ticket on the site, you can use Orbitz's search engine to find a cheap fare.

The heart of Orbitz is also available for bargain-hunters at ITA Software's beta site. R.M. Carlson, a former travel manager from Brea, Calif., wanted to fly two relatives from Colorado to Illinois via Los Angeles, and they were being quoted fares of around $700 each on American Airlines. He logged on to the ITA site and found a fare of $360 that even permitted his family to stop over in Los Angeles for a long weekend. "I tried to book that itinerary on Expedia, but I couldn't find the fare," Carlson says. "I even went to the American Airlines site and couldn't find it," he says. "I had to call the airline directly and book it through them."

Orbitz or not, things are getting better for travelers who want to use the Web to find fares and rooms. Expect technical difficulties, restrictions, even disappointments as companies work to shake the bugs out of their sites. But once the troubles that every new site experiences are behind them, this could turn out to be an autumn in which more than the leaves are dropping. The cost of your next trip could be falling, too.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion. Inside Interactive Travel appears biweekly on this site and on Gomez Advisors' GomezPro site.