The Aggregators are Coming

Ed Hewitt over at The Independent Traveler wrote a great feature, "The Aggregators are Coming" that examines and compares travel industry comparison shopping sites. Although he opens by conceding that there still isn't a perfect comparison shopping site that covers all of the vendors currently vying for market share, he claims:"a few sites have emerged as the go-to leaders in the biz, which appears to be going by the name travel 'aggregators:' Sidestep, Kayak, Mobissimo, Qixo, and Yahoo's new FareChase." He goes on to explain the obvious benefit of cross vendor comparison shopping sites. "The great advantage of aggregators is the ability to search dozens of airline Web sites, all at the same time, as well as one or more of the major booking sites. Aggregator sites run searches on numerous Web sites simultaneously, then link directly to the search results so you can purchase the fares within a click or two." Hewitt takes a look at some of the challenges facing the aggregators including "scraping" and "deep linking" bans among many big travel service resellers. And then he plunges into a couple of actual case studies, picking destinations and dates and comparing the results. His findings are somewhat inconclusive, but his observations are interesting. Based purely on lowest airfare, Yahoo's FareChase won in both of his case studies. In fact, in both case studies, FareChase "found low fares on Northwest that none of the other sites did." So, although he grumbles about too many similar prices, and somewhat inconclusive fare findings, he gives FareChase "the nod on price". As for the broadest scope of relevant results, he was most pleased with "Sidestep's double net of Web site and downloadable toolbar." He applauds their flexibility (evidence their decision to introduce a web-based tool in addition to the download which had already proven itself to be "a superb travel search engine" and their inclusion of a "large, established representation of travel vendors" including JetBlue and Orbitz. He was noticeably wowed that Sidestep's "allows you to filter and restrict results by flight times, number of connections, airline, nearby airports, and by price range." In short, lots of results and powerful filtering abilities. Sometimes lots of results is too many. Hewitt seems to run a little "luke warm" on Kayak, due primarily to "Kayak's broad definition of 'nearby airport'" which resulted in rates quoted from an overly abundant and somewhat irrelevant list of airports. He does concede that Kayak's airport check box refining tool resolves this problem, but apparently sees it as being clumsy? Although he's not overly enthusiastic about Mobissimo or Qixo, he doesn't dump them either: "Mobissimo's laconic presentation of price and flight times makes it perhaps the easiest to parse purely on pricing/convenience factors, although at a price of less customizable results." "Qixo ran neck and neck in the lead [for low fares]… However, Qixo's list of international partners is promising; I would definitely check Qixo for European puddle jumps, for example." Qixo searches over twenty international vendors including easyJet, JetBlue, Jetsgo, Opodo and OneTravel. Kayak, one of my personal favorites, seems to have gotten the brush. He did mention the checkbox filtering options along the left hand side navigational bar which gives you the ability to manipulate findings in a variety of helpful way, but generally he didn't offer too much support for the tool that they've developed. Since he published this article, Kayak has also introduced an quirky product called "Best Fare Buzz" which works with Google Earth and is a way to procrastinate if you need a break!