Searching the Internet 005: Travel Planning (enhanced)
Episode 005 of Searching the Internet covers travel related search sites such as Travelocity, Expedia, Hotels.com and more as well as some lesser know but very good newcomers to the travel search market. Also how to choose a seat on a airline flight and some places for information on various vacation destinations.
00:00 Intro
Search Engine News
01:42 Gapminder.org: A interactive flash presentation of various data available on countries around the world.
Major Travel Search Sites
03:58 Expedia
05:12 Travelocity
06:33 Yahoo’s Farechase
10:20 Orbitz
12:11 Sidestep
New Travel Search Sites
16:34 Kayak
19:06 Dohop
20:05 Mobissimo Travel
21:35 Summary of Airfare Sites
Airline and Airport Information
23:20 Airwise
24:55 Skytrax Airlinequailty
26:56 Airtimetable.com
28:19 Summary of Airtravel Sites
Selecting your Airline Seat
29:14 Seatguru
31:26 Sidestep
32:23 Seat Expert
33:19 Summary of Seat Selection Sites
Hotels.com and Sites With Destiniation Guides
33:51 Hotels.com
36:37 Fodors
38:14 Independent Traveler
40:17 Lonely Planet
30:10 Wrapup
Other podcasts mentioning travel search (powered by Podzinger)
Technorati Tags: air travel, Dohop, Expedia, Farechase, Fodors, Indendent Traveler, Kayak, Lonely planet, Mobissimo, Orbitz, podcast, search engine, Seat Expert, Seatguru, Sidestep, travel, Travelocity
June 30th, 2006 at 10:49 am
A nice summary of travel sites. I did a screencast of Kayak on one of my video editions.
July 2nd, 2006 at 6:16 pm
Chris was too modest to post a link directly to the screencast episode so I’ll do it.
November 8th, 2006 at 6:54 pm
One new site for travelers to consider is cFares (www.cfares.com). It is kind of like Costco and Walmart for savings deals. People shop at these stores to reap special savings. cFares offers consumers either option; they can get low prices as a free gold member (like Walmart), or they can opt to pay a nominal annual fee for a platinum membership (like Costco) and reap even greater savings on the lowest airfares –particularly for international travel.
cFares apparently is the only online travel site to allow access to less expensive wholesale discount prices, traditionally only available through specialty travel agencies that concentrate in discounted consolidator airfares.
Travelers can pick a specific flight and then set up a persistent search for a fare that they are willing to pay. cFares can do a persistent search that will seek out that fare and can hold it for 24 hours before one chooses to pay. Since air fares typically fluctuate several times during the day, cFares will snag the flight fare on the downturn. Also, unlike other online sites like Priceline, cFares doesn’t sell “blind buys,” where a traveler doesn’t know the flight details until after they have spent the money and bought the ticket.
cFares’ airline partners offer consumers dynamic rebates at the point-of-sale. These one-of-a-kind fare rebates are not available anywhere else in the market.