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Why has Orbitz gotten rid of its flexible search?

I’ve put in a call to Orbitz to find out, and I’ll post the response when/if they respond, but the bottom line is, their once-powerful fare engine has been severely limited. You need to know specific travel dates to do their flight search. Thumbs down.

Orbitz runs on ITA Software code in the back office. It’s a really powerful booking engine that I often recommend (click “login as guest” to use free), since it lets you control the variables like no one else. Two other sites that use ITA, continental.com and the recently released beta-version of united.com, are both more flexible. So why is Orbitz killing this feature?

One alternative is to use an aggregator, many of which do have good flexible-date searches. Among the aggregators, I generally recommend Kayak (see April 2006 reviews here), which recently introduced flex-searches (registration required, though).

Another aggregator, PriceGrabber, has a decent interface, too. Alas, no flexible search, but they just added a neat feature: a list of amenities on each flight, such as seat pitch, in-flight entertainment options, in-seat power availability, and on-time statistics. On the searches I conducted, the amenity information was correct, even for many codeshared flights. The site still has its downsides — its results didn’t find the lowest fare on any of the searches I conducted — arguably the ultimate test of a fare engine — but it’s getting better!

Related:
- Disaggregating fare aggregators
- Disaggregating the aggregators, Part 2: Rating the hotel metasearches
- Online travel search improvements
- Flexible-date search alternatives for international destinations