Merge and Purge

Let me take you on a little travel news tour uncovering how changes in the works, will impact the way we buy our airline tickets. Unless you persistently follow travel news, you may not be aware of what is happening. This little post could save you some time and potentially some aggravation.

For years, Travelocity has been a go to site for seeking out the best prices on airfare and hotels. This was part of my arsenal when I did my searches. Now, I can scratch it off the list. Here is why…

As quoted from Skifttake “As expected after the early termination of a Federal Trade Commission antitrust review two weeks ago, Expedia Inc. acquired Travelocity outright for an underwhelming $280 million in cash.” The full story is here. Of course, they will maintain the Travelocity name and website for those not aware.

Well, Expedia is on a shopping spree for sure. Not only did they bargain for Travelocity, when you are on a streak, why stop there? They went after and acquired Orbitz, another former competitor. This narrows the field from the four major players: Orbitz, Travelocity, Expedia, and Priceline down to two. Are you keeping track or do I need to spell it out for you? EXPEDIA and Priceline.

If you were not aware, Expedia also owns Hotels.com, Hotwire, Trivago, CheapTickets and eBookers, Venere, CarRentals.com, Classic Vacations, Expedia Cruise Ships, plus others with lesser-known names. Priceline’s stable includes Booking.com, Kayak and Agoda.com. Most roads will lead to Expedia.

Other mergers you may or may not care about, depending on your search style, Skifttake also reports “Switzerland-based Bravofly has an agreement to acquire Lastminute.com, often referred to as Travelocity Europe, for $120 million. Subject to regulatory approvals, the LastMinute.com deal is expected to close in the next couple of months.”

This news will certainly help me purge my travel searching bookmarks. Hunting through multiply versions of Expedia will result in a paraphrasing of Albert Einstein’s quote “Stupidity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Until something happens to them, my favorite search engines are Hipmunk, Adioso, Google Flights, and Drungli.

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Airline Search Hell

Spring is in the air and Ron's thoughts roam to Denver, Iowa and every once in a while Pittsburgh. Yes, it is his any adventure to the US, a place I have not cared to visit since 2003. Its all good that I stay away. 

Before Ron can plan any flights, he has to send out 43 e-mails to family and friends to verify which dates are good, which are not and then coordinate everyone's good and bad lists. There really should be a computerized calculation program that monitors people's behaviors that are fed into a giant data bank. When you want to visit, you plug in your ID and then the data bank spits out a report. This is an optimal time to visit 39.25 out of 43 of your friends and relatives. Of the 39.25, 13.05 don't give a hoot whether you visit or not.

Ron has been poring over airline consolidator sites looking for good deals. BUD>DEN, CID>PIT, and then PIT>BUD with moving dates here and there, but the prices still came out close to $2,000. That is more than what we paid to fly from BUD>ADL and that was a HEL OFA WAY FAR. This is nuts spending this amount of money for 3 weeks, but he insists. My view is if they want to see me badly enough, they will come here every other year. So far, no one has come. All the more reason for me not to spend the money to go there. 

Half of my day has been spent trying to find the best possible fares without having to mortgage my organs to pay for it. It still is beyond my perception why travel authorities praise Kayak search engine. I think bait and switch technique extraordinaire fits it well. Over the years, I have tried it a dozen times with hopes my luck has changed. Today, I found a great multi-city deal for Ron. When I clicked on "Book Now" it shows a message stating it has to redirect me to the US Airways website. Those seconds of transfer raised the price by $1,000. Orbitz was no better. All of the great deals "could not be confirmed by the airlines". So why are they still on the site if they cannot be grabbed. 

I tried different credit cards, different browsers, different sites; it was all an exercise in frustration. Then I gave CheapTickets.com a shot. The price was good if you can call $1,290 good, but still better than the $2,000 offerings elsewhere. 

I booked it not giving a rat's a*$ whether Ron liked the times or not. My day was shot, my patience wore out 2 years ago. Appearing before me was the same form as Orbitz, which did not bode well and I felt Murphy's Law creeping up on me again.

Success!! I was so excited I almost wanted to book a second ticket from excitement, but was able to keep myself at bay. Such are the joys of travel.

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Cheap Flight Hunting

As my moniker suggests, I love budget options. When it comes time for find cheap airfare, I really scrape the bottom of the Internet barrel looking for the tools to aid my search. One thing that I really find is a time waster is having to go from one web site to another. Today, I came across a great site that consolidates the searches. Cheap-Flights.to makes it easy to compare fares, hotels, car rentals and package deals. 

Cheap-Flights.to uses the major consolidators: Kayak, Expedia,  Orbitz, and Mobissimosearch engine individually, saving on time and potential typing errors with dates. putting links to each of them directly on your search page. There is no need to put your data into each

Just one example proves the point. I did a sample search for Budapest to Riga for October. On Kayak the cheapest flight was on Polish Lot Airlines for $285 pp, but when going to the final stages, the grand total is $569. 

Orbitz shows the flights as $116 pp, but with taxes $295 for a final total of $59158. 

Mobissimo did the worst, sending me on to Ebookers in the UK. The least expensive flight was 319 BP, which at today's exchange is $492, although there may have been more charges had I gone through with the booking process. Interestingly, they are still using the same Polish Lot flight to Warsaw as the others, but then changing to Lufthansa. 

Expedia has a total fare of $474, making it the champ for this round.

I will certainly be bookmarking Cheap-Flights.to for my future travels.

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