Discount airfare cheap airline ticket

TRAVEL | Cutting airfare costs by BUYING TICKETS ONLINE can still be a chaotic business, but some Web leaders are worth considering.

WHEN ROBERT SAGE of Los Angeles shopped for cheap airfares on the Web, he usually crashed and burned: After clicking on a bargain-basement fare listed on Cheaptickets.com, Travelocity.com or another online travel-booking service, he inevitably found that the fare was unavailable. But he finally hit pay dirt last December after he submitted a $368 bid to Priceline.com for a Los Angeles-London ticket over the holidays. Within an hour he received an e-mail that his bid had been accepted, and the next day two tickets arrived at his doorstep via express mail. Sage and his wife flew to London the day after Christmas for about $900 round-trip (including taxes and fees).

Getting that cheap flight took a bit of legwork: Priceline had rejected Sage's initial bid of $300. He then checked out the lowest fares for the route listed on a handful of online travel-booking services before submitting the winning bid.

Once the province of a small band of techies and road warriors who had the patience and the know-how to decipher glitch-plagued online travel-booking sites, Web travel has grown up. The best sites finally live up to their promise of delivering fares and flight information within two or three clicks. But to be assured of the best deal, you still have to spend a considerable amount of time shopping around.

Maybe because of Web booking's spotty past, online bookings account for only 4% of the overall travel market. Nine million households booked travel online in 1999, according to Forrester Research. But thanks in large measure to continual improvements, Forrester expects that number to nearly triple, to 26 million households, by 2003.

Forrester's research also reveals that travelers like the Web mainly because it offers convenience and the ability to comparison shop for lower prices. Seventy-seven percent of bookers surveyed said they liked being able to book travel off-hours; 64% liked the speed; 66% said they found the best fares online; and 53% believed the Web offers the most choices.

On the downside, shopping for fares online still takes work, even when it's something as simple as finding the lowest published round-trip airfare from New York to Paris. Some of the discounts advertised prove to be so much hype--either not available, or not that cheap. Even some of the better sites have kinks that can leave you stranded, unable either to rebook or to change your preference.

For example, a recent attempt to book a flight on Buytravel.com (www.buy.com/travel) went swimmingly until we tried to select a seat on the Web site's aircraft blueprint. It turned out that the only seats available were for preferred frequent-flier members. Finding a nonpreferred seat meant starting the booking process again from scratch.

And service leaves something to be desired. Customers report long hold times on the phone and vendors that fail to confirm a ticket by e-mail as promised and to disclose extra fees up front. "People say `Never again--the frustration isn't worth the $16, $20 or $100 in savings,'" says Eric Mohl, producer of the travel channel at Deja.com.

But online service has its advantages. For example, analysts say that Travelocity and Expedia, the top two online travel agencies, outperformed the airlines when it came to advising customers about a pending airline strike and hurricane-related delays.

Bigger may be better

WHEN STARTING your fare search, the industry giants, Expedia and Travelocity, deserve your first look. Their new fare-finding screens let users quickly seek out the lowest available fares for a variety of itineraries without spending hours in front of the computer. (Expedia has also eliminated registration and the need to log in with a password, giving it an instant advantage over Travelocity.)

With Expedia's Fare Compare, you can specify the airport, airline and type of flight (nonstop or connecting) you prefer, along with the date and time of day. The site's Fare Calendar shows at a glance when the lowest published fares are available.

Expedia also recently introduced Flight Price Matcher, a bidding service in which, like Priceline.com, customers name their own price. Expedia promises a response within 15 minutes. Rather than develop its own auction service, Travelocity has partnered with Priceline.

Travelocity's Fare Watcher lets you construct your own Personal Fare Watcher page, in which you plug in the round-trip fare you'd be willing to pay between any two cities. It then tracks the fare on the specified route (up to five city pairs are allowed) and sends an e-mail should the amount increase or decrease by more than $25. For example, a few days after entering a fare of $298 for New York to San Francisco on our page, we received an e-mail telling us that the lowest available fare had decreased to $258. The e-mail included some nice touches: a URL link to find the fare, advice to act quickly if we wanted to book it and a note that the price didn't include taxes or extra fees.

If the amount you request is already higher than an existing fare, Fare Watcher immediately lets you know. For example, after we entered $400 for New York to Madrid, Travelocity said that the lowest available fare was $298 on Iberia. Even better, after checking a calendar of dates that popped up, it turned out that seats were still available for a departure just four days hence and for a return flight a week later. Total price, including taxes, came to just $346.

But after typing in the same dates for New York to Madrid under "Find the best fare for your round-trip flight now!" on the home page, the lowest that came up was $709. Such inconsistencies are not uncommon, according to online booker Douglas Hoyt. He suggests searching also by individual airline, noting that a recent search for the cheapest fare round-trip between Hamburg and Barcelona on Travelocity revealed a price of $260 on Alitalia, Iberia and Sabena. But when Hoyt confined his search to KLM, he got a fare of $211 for the same route.

Travelocity's Best Fare Finder, originally limited to domestic and Canadian fares, was expanded to include international fares in the spring, making it the equal of Expedia's Fare Compare. Travelocity definitely had the edge over Expedia on the fare from New York to Paris. Its cheapest listing was Air France's $401, which beat Expedia's best deal by $60.

You can also check multiple fares from your home city on Travelocity by using a new feature called Dream Map. After you select a destination and a maximum fare, a map appears showing the fares on the major routes that fall below your target price. By clicking on the route, you can find out which airlines are offering the fare and with what restrictions.

In the race to become your one-stop travel shop of choice, both sites are beefing up their selection of hotels, cruises, vacation packages and other content. Expedia has acquired the hotel-discount sites Travelscape.com and VacationSpot.com; Travelocity has merged with Preview Travel. Preview Travel, the third-largest online travel agency, has one of the broadest vacation-and-leisure package listings on the Web and will greatly boost Travelocity's accommodations listings, which currently include a database of 47,000 chain hotels and a bed-and-breakfast directory.

Improvement is certainly needed: On both Travelocity and Expedia, users searching for hotels and vacation packages are currently hamstrung by occasional poor selection and incomplete information. For now, a traditional guidebook is a better way to go if you're not seeking a chain hotel.

The hegemony of both sites may be challenged this summer with the expected launch of a new travel-booking Web site, informally called T2. Owned by Continental, Delta, Northwest and United airlines, the site is expected to have at least 30 member airlines, and will combine published fares within a computer-reservation system and Internet-only fares. The site is pending approval from the Justice Department.

Other contenders

MEANWHILE, AT LEAST a dozen online discount agencies are vying for a piece of the action. Many are airline consolidators, which buy up blocks of seats at wholesale prices and resell them to the public at a discount. These companies advertise through "800" numbers in the Sunday newspapers, and still do most of their business through these call centers.

Overall, the bargain airfare sites are disappointing. Lowairfare.com, for example, uses instant messaging to connect you directly to an agent, a clunky way to communicate. Other services, including 1travel.com and 1800airfare.com, use old-style booking systems that take forever and are plagued with glitches.