Have you ever gone temporarily mad trying to book a multi-stop business trip only to hit the back button and lose everything? CoolHunting points us to AirTreks new TripPlanner, a Flash-based trip planning and pricing service that took 1/4 the time to pull up a 4-stop trip than a 1 stop at ahem… the other folks’ site. I cannot vouch for pricing but I’d pay $5 per trip just for the convenience of actually being able to work through what-if scenarios quickly.
<rant>While I’m at it, I want a flight pricing service that builds a calendar grid showing prices for the same flights on different days. Then you just pick and choose. Most of us by now know that Tuesday is normally the cheapest day of the week to fly, but if I’m flexible in my vacation planning. How about just giving me the info instead of making me cobble together a little spreadsheet of “what if” scenarios? What’s that you say, most people just suck it up and pay the higher prices to fly the days they want to? Damn. Does anyone else spend 2 hours trying to find the best deals?</rant>
5 responses to “AirTrek”
United used to have a Win32 client that would do this. You could specify how flexible you were on the outbounad and the return and it would calculate all the combinations to give you the lowest fare. They of course dropped these features when they went to the web…
Travelocity has a new +/- matrix that is very promising. The only problem is that it’s a bit buggy — I’ve found that the prices shown in the matrix don’t always jive with the actual prices with the flights. But it’s the right idea…
Two of the best sites I’ve used for the price/day matrix is America West’s Low Fare Finder (www.americawest.com) and Air Canada (http://www.aircanada.com). They both give a break down of fares for dates +/- a few days of the dates you searched for.
Thanks guys- I’ll have to check these out.
Great post. Thanks for sharing this information they are very useful.