Fri 18 Jan 2008
Simple return flight searches may be solved, but based on my experience booking our family’s summer trip to Europe this week, there is room for improvement in travel search.
It may go without saying, though I’ll say it anyway, that I try to buy everything I can online. This is both practical and professional–I can shop whenever I want and save time and gasoline, as well as collect UI for later reference. So though I might consult a travel agent, if, for example, I were undertaking a place that requires a guide, for all else it’s broadband and me.
The trip this summer is a combination of Italy and the UK and is somewhat complicated. We’re going to Italy for a week to visit Larry’s parents, then to Venice because the girls will love it, and then up to northwest England to introduce them to the British countryside. We’ll fly to Florence from Seattle, pick up a car for a week, drop it off in Venice, fly up to England, pick up another car, and then drop it off at Heathrow on our way back home.
Long story short, though: by doing my own search, I was able to save a lot of money, between $500 and $3000 depending on how you look at it.
Although there are several established players in online travel, most prioritize their results based on speed of delivery and existing partnerships. So you have speed and inventory, but not necessarily the options that matter most to you for any particular itinerary. This tells me that there is still a lot of upside for travel sites who can help customers prioritize criteria and in so doing offer a higher class of service, and like me, possibly even a less expensive fare by doing so.
I’ve been following articles on the best travel search engines so started with them first, specifically Kayak, Farecast (which is so smart–more on that later) and Mobissimo, and started with a slow pitch: Seattle to Florence and surrounding airports, and then back from Venice to Seattle. I began with an Italy-only trip because initially, and it turns out mistakenly, I thought that the UK add-on would significantly increase the cost of our trip.
All of the below route to Orbitz–likely there is some business rule in these to route there for multi-city European trips.
- Kayak: $1382 per person.
- Layovers: Amsterdam and London are the hubs with no long or American city layovers.
- Total travel time: 14 hours on the way out and 15 on the way back.
- Child reduced fare: Orbitz pays it forward; I save about $200 per ticket for the kids because they’re under 12.
- Farecast: $1638 per person, again through Orbitz.
- Layovers: Philadelphia on each side. American layovers significantly increase the wear-and-tear factor for European travel because the trip from East coast cities takes nearly as long as a straight shot from the West coast, plus there is the layover time to add to it.
- Total travel time: nearly 19 hours each way.
- Child reduced fare: yep.
- Mobissimo: Same flights as Kayak.
Just to round out the offerings, Expedia bombed rather spectacularly with an $1800 per person cost via Delta, that included especially gruesome layovers involving New York, Rome, Paris and Atlanta, and total travel times of 26 hours on the way out, and 22 on the way back (!). Travelocity found a shorter way out on Delta (13 hours), and slightly improved on the return with 20 hours, though the tickets were still $1800/pp. Outbound, however, featured a layover in Charles de Gaulle of 1 hour and 10 minutes before catching the connection to Florence. Those of you who have had the experience of sitting on a bus on the tarmack at de Gaulle for 45 minutes after disembarking, only to then have to claim bags, clear customs, recheck bags, go through security, and somehow make it to a different terminal for the connection are laughing out loud right now.
OK, so we had a very wide range. Given this, I started looking at what adding in the UK segment would cost. I started executing literally scores of searches, including various one way and return combinations to find the least expensive and fastest option. Given the preview of the instruments of torture within the itineraries from Expedia and Travelocity, I decided to start with the airlines that fly from Seattle directly to Europe: Northwest, British Airways, and Air France.
British Airways offered a cool option, which I wrote about below: the ability to upgrade the Seattle-to-London segment to Economy Plus for $400/pp. It would be great to see other airlines do this online, and to offer the ability to upgrade to business for particular segments as well. The international segment upgrade to business class is well worth it, for example, but a domestic upgrade to first class isn’t–at least to me. The price for the Economy fare: $1200/per person. The problem with the BA flights for my itineary, though, was that the connection to Florence (or Pisa, or Bologna) required an airport change to Gatwick from Heathrow and a 6 hour layover. With two kids. Jetlagged. Enough said.
I really don’t like to travel on Air France if I have to connect in Paris, for reasons outlined above. No need for a flare up of the PTSD from previous trips. So I focused instead on Northwest. Presto! A flight out of Seattle to Florence connecting in Amsterdam with a just right 2 hour layover, and then back from London to Seattle direct on BA on our dates. Price: $1175/pp–a savings of $200/pp over the Italy-only trip. Effectively then, if I could get us to the UK for $200 per person or less, we would get the UK segment of the trip for free.
So one obstacle remained: getting from Italy to the UK. There are many budget airlines operating within Europe, but probably the two best known are RyanAir and EasyJet. I tried both. RyanAir gave me an astounding $30/per person for a flight between Venice’s Treviso airport and Liverpool. The catch? Only one flight per day, notoriously bad customer service, and–probably most annoying–a maximum baggage weight per bag of 33 pounds, with a penalty of about $3.50 per pound for every pound over. Since we would have just spent 10 days in Italy, the likelihood that we’d all be weighing in at 50 pounds was high, which meant that the true cost of the fare would be around $90/per person. EasyJet, on the other hand, was willing to take us to the nearby East Midland Airport near Nottingham for about $80/per person, and doubled the weight allowance of RyanAir.
I’ll be booking the Northwest/BA/EasyJet trip. Total cost: $1255/per person. The question, then, is why–if all of the content is already out there–did I have to personally intervene to find the best price and itinerary for my trip?
Good question.