Downgraded: Odds of seeing pole-dancer art on London-Gatwick approach
First it was the Kentucky Fried Chicken ad featuring a Colonel Sanders image visible from space. Now, a website’s advertisement featuring a giant chalk outline of a poledancing stripper is causing controversy in the UK. The image, in a field below a common approach path for flights to London’s Gatwick Airport, is only visible from the air, but is still causing an affront. It’s likely to be removed soon. But thanks to news reports and posts like this one far more people will see it online than ever would see it from a plane. (Yes, I’m guilty of supporting their marketing machine… I know…)

Upgraded: Kayak.com introduces alliance-based search
Aggregator Kayak.com tweaked its search tools ever so slightly, allowing you to sort by alliance (Star, oneworld, Skyteam) and not just by airline. But you can only sort it that way AFTER you’ve the basic search. (You can search preferred airlines up front, so why not alliances? Meh.) Orbitz has allowed alliance search for some time, but this is the first aggregator that I’m aware of that’s doing this.

Upgraded: Hertz’s environmentalist credibility
Last September, Hertz rolled out its “Green Collection” of rental cars and I was thoroughly unimpressed. Buick LaCrosse? Come on. Where were the hybrids? Well, it took nine months, but Hertz finally got around to buying more genuinely eco-friendly vehicles, with a purchase of 3,400 Toyota Priuses (or is that Prii?). That’s more like it.

Upgraded: Wine in coach. Viva jetBlue!
JetBlue is serving up some slightly more interesting wines than usual the usual coach fare. Thanks to a partnership with Best Cellars, the airline is giving their all-economy class passengers a slightly better guzzle. Choosing wine for coach can be challenging, since it has to be a) cheap, b) in tiny ready-for-sale bottles, unlike in premium cabins, and c) pair-able with a wider range of foods. I hadn’t thought about that last one before: After all, the wine in business and first can presumably be paired with the menu (though that’s not always obvious). But in coach, a wine demands “versatility in pairing with a wide assortment of airport meals people bring on planes, including pan pizzas from Pizza Hut and Taco Bell burritos with chicken and mole sauce.” (Taco Bell has a mole sauce? Really?) Either way, good for jetBlue, and good for their wine-imbibing passengers. (Thanks Tyler!)

Downgraded: US Airways right to serve any wine
Unlike jetBlue… US Airways, which got into trouble for selling booze without a license in New Mexico a few months ago, and which has been serving the sauce with a temporary scrip since then, was denied an extension of its license this past week. Tough break. BYOB, anyone?

Upgraded: Marriott; Downgraded: Ian Schrager (or is it the other way around?)
Look, I happen to like Marriott hotels for what they are: Consistent, clean, competent, and overall comfortable spaces to spend the night. (4 C’s!) They usually don’t have too much bling or pizazz, though some of their big-city properties have that 1980s glitz that has an odd appeal to my mid-to-late-30s, graying-gracefully, receding-hairline self. So when I hear that they’re teaming up with Ian Schrager, king of the boutique hotel, to create a new boutique-y brand, I’m skeptical. It seems like a late-to-the-game attempt to create a “W” chain within a chain. If it adds a little funk to the Marriott decor, great. (Bye bye brass fixtures, please!) But it also smacks of desperation. And isn’t Ian Schrager past this? Seems like he’s here to cash in while the cashin’ in is good.

Upgraded: WestJet’s honesty; Downgraded: Little old ladies’ pensions
Canada’s WestJet (hearts) little old ladies. Not because they’re nice grandmas, but because they’re walking piggy banks, and the airline’s got a hammer. Consider this nugget from the airline’s president:

“There would be a little old lady coming up and she’d have a table and she’d have a chair and she’d have six or seven bags and we’d say ‘Yeah, take it on the plane. No problem.’ Now we’re actually going to charge a little bit of money for taking that table and chair and those extra bags on board. And that incremental revenue that we extract from that little old lady is very, very profitable to us. Some 85% goes to the bottom line.”

Good for him, for saying publicly what other airline executives discuss privately. So I guess the business traveler isn’t the company profit center; the rarely-traveled senior citizen is. Bank it.

Upgraded: Amputees and their TSA experience
Got a prosthetic? The TSA wants to make your security checkpoint experience kinder and gentler. Good! On the other hand…

Downgraded: Sippy cups, and TSA cinema verité
A former Secret Service agent reports that she was harassed when she accidentally carried her child’s sippy cup of water through security. Stupid enough, but it gets more absurd: The TSA actually released a silent security tape of the incident, labeled “Mythbusters,” in their own defense. Feel free to view the videos, read the incident report, review the embarrassed mother’s story, and decide for yourself.

Upgraded: Demolition
Let me make myself perfectly clear: I want to help destroy this hotel. I’ve never been to it, but I want to help Spanish hotel chain NH Hoteles wreck the Alcala Hotel in Madrid. The company is holding a contest to see who can take a sledgehammer to the joint. Only 30 lucky few will get to play rockstar-cum-wrecking ball. Let the spirit of Keith Moon guide you.

In the last week, BusinessWeek and the Associated Press have taken on the same task that this blog took on weeks ago: rating the travel aggregator sites, Kayak, Mobissimo, FareChase, SideStep, etc., for their usefulness in conducting airfare searches. (You think Anick Jesdanun of the Associated Press and Sarah Lacy of BusinessWeek read this site? Hi guys!)

Note that I went the next step and also reviewed aggregator hotel searches… Let’s see if they follow suit and do the same!

(snideness: off)

AP’s Jesdanun agrees with my assessment of Kayak as the superior airfare search, but BusinessWeek’s Lacy downplays Kayak and instead favors SideStep for its downloadable toolbar “big brother” feature. This is a reason NOT to like SideStep if you ask me. I just don’t trust these browse-along features to protect my privacy. Call me paranoid.

In aggregator news, Mobissimo has in recent weeks made some improvements, broadening the number of sites they search (and pitching the means by which they conduct their searches.) Their recently launched India-based site is a big move. But I still just don’t like their user interface, their comparative lack of information, or their lack of controls. It’s getting better, but it’s not there yet.

Two weeks ago, I offered this assessment of airfare aggregators — sites that perform an identical search across multiple travel sites and report the results to you. But most of these sites can be used for hotel searches as well. How do the aggregators stack up for lodging?

Hotel searches are trickier than airfares, for the most part, because not all rooms are created equal, and hotel location is less standardized than air travel routes. Finding a low rate isn’t helpful if you have strong preferences for two queen beds vs. one king bed, or smoking vs nonsmoking, or if you need to be within walking distance of a particular location.

(Note also: For many large chains’ loyalty programs, you now are required to reserve the room through their own sites in order to collect the points. The aggregators may be helpful in finding a lower rate booked through another site, but be sure you’re aware of point accrual rules before committing to anything.)

In contention here are Kayak, SideStep, FareChase, Mobissimo, Qixo, Bezurk, PriceGrabber, and the newly-launched hotel-only SearchParty.

I ran three separate searches on all engines: one stay in San Francisco, one in Paris, and one in Moab, Utah. The idea was to test large and small U.S. destinations, as well as an international location. I also ran the same searches on Travelocity and Orbitz to see how the traditional sites compared.

Once again, Kayak comes out on top. But this time the competition is closer on its heels. Farechase comes in a close second for North American searches, with Sidestep and Bezurk coming close for international. Worst performer of the bunch, by far, is Qixo — when its servers were working at all. SearchParty is unique in showing the cancellation policies, but its prices are still too unreliable for me to recommend the site; in time, it may improve.

The breakdown:

Kayak
Kayak offered a comprehensive mix of independent and chain hotels, including hotels you couldn’t book online. Their goal — to catalog every hotel on earth — is not quite reached, but they do an admirable job. They even include small, independent hotels that can’t be booked anywhere online (they give you a phone number in such cases, but these offline hotels may be listed without rates). Kayak’s controls are also the best. The difference: More options to let you narrow the search, and not just sort results. For example: While others, such as Farechase and Sidestep, let you narrow down results by neighborhood, and Farechase lets you sort results by distance from a given point, only Kayak lets you narrow the search by a geographic radius — without sacrificing the other variables you want to control. It’s a subtle difference, but this level of output control makes filtered results far more relevant. They include a small map as well (powered by Google), which is helpful. Downsides: No reviews or photos (minor quibbles), and they could offer more room amenity options to filter results.

Farechase
Update: Yahoo has abandoned Farechase; this review remains up for posterity, but the site is gone.
Yahoo’s Farechase responded more quickly than the other sites — the fastest response in the group. Controls to narrow results include price range, class (stars), neighborhoods, bed type, and an amenity list. The results can be sorted by popularity (default), price, name, or distance from the search term. Results include a small photo of the hotel, if available, but I’m really not sure how useful this is. Sometimes the quality is poor, sometimes it’s just a photo of a bed. You can’t garner much from the photos. The map is huge — maybe too big, even. One nice feature is the consumer reviews, garnered from Yahoo and Travelocity. TripAdvisor is still a far richer resource for reviews, but having user reviews is a positive, nonetheless. Major downside to FareChase: Searches are possible for US and Canada hotels only. Get a passport, guys!

SideStep
Sidestep’s output is similar to Farechase, but without a map, and without a way to limit bed types. Like Kayak and Farechase, sponsored results get top ranking. Photos are the same size and quality as Farechase. A small number of Sidestep-user-generated reviews. Prices were good for international searches. A solid performer.

Mobissimo
Mobissimo has fewer controls than the others. Default ranking is by price, without regard for location or class. You can sort results by stars, price, name, or provider, but it doesn’t give you any choices over the location of the hotel or the kind of room you’re searching. International search results were good, but the results are so hard to wade through, it’s still an inferior search.

Qixo
Like Mobissimo, Qixo doesn’t offer many controls over the output. For some reason, the site had trouble loading on one computer I was using, but worked fine on another computer in the same network. (Qixo shifts from qixo.com to res99.com for search results, which may have something to do with it.) But regardless of the networking issues, it was still an inferior product. The highest prices, by far. The least control over the output. Don’t bother with this site.

Bezurk
Bezurk found the lowest prices for the Paris search, but it was far less effective for US-based searches. (Their best deals seem to come from HotelClub.com, which I did not see listed in any of the other aggregators.) Not as many controls as the others, but the deals are good.

Pricegrabber
Update: PriceGrabber has thrown in the towel, shutting down their travel search feature. The rest of their site is still up and running. This review stays up, though the travel service is defunct.
PriceGrabber grabbed some pretty high prices in Paris and San Francisco. Its rates were par for the course in Moab. Their initial search has limited options, but the results can be filtered further (star rating, price, features, etc., but not distance from a particular point). Still, other sites offer better controls. PriceGrabber isn’t bad, but you can do better.

SearchParty
SearchParty, a new entrant specializing entirely in hotel searches, needs to work some kinks out. The site is attractive in its presentation: For each hotel, they show the prices of the three least expensive providers. When you click through to compare the booking options, you see the cancellation policies and fees, which is a VERY nice feature. But the prices that come up in the search are simply unreliable. Click on that $69 rate at the Sleep Inn, and the very next screen tells you it’s actually $99. What good is an aggregator that can’t get its prices right? Further, its searches are limited to the United States only. Finally, there’s no way to limit searches by bed/room type. SearchParty has potential, but it has a way to go.

The “Control Group” in the experiment: Neither Orbitz nor Travelocity found as many options as the aggregators. Orbitz was easier to narrow down and control. But price-wise, the aggregators found lower base rates.

(image: Intercontinental Amstel Hotel, Amsterdam, photo via larscapes.com)

A number of websites have cropped up in recent years, offering multi-site searches for airfare, hotels, and rental cars. I don’t mean the online travel agencies like Expedia or Orbitz. Rather, I’m referring to the sites which allow you to search availability across online agencies, consolidators, and the providers themselves. These sites, called aggregators, collect a few dollars for every sale that results from their referral, at no additional cost to the person doing the searching.

The great benefit of these sites is that you get greater transparency of fares. However, not all aggregators are created equal. I put a few to the test.

For the time being, I limited my comparison to airfare searches. I looked for accuracy (did the quoted price match the price actually offered at the provider’s page?), depth of information (does the site give the booking class, cancellation policies, etc.?), and control (can you sort searches easily, by provider, by price, by distance, etc.?)

For airfare, I compared Kayak, Farechase, Mobissimo, Bezurk, Farecompare, Sidestep, and Pricegrabber. (Since I’m based in the United States, these results may be biased toward North American searches.)

The result: Kayak came out on top, with the lowest prices, the most control over the output, and most information about both airlines and sellers. Sidestep comes close. Farecompare gets an honorable mention for its price-driven approach. All sites accurately reported fares — there were no surprises when clicking through to the target site. However, no single aggregator actually found every flight option or every major travel site.

Kayak
If you know your dates of travel, Kayak offers the most powerful site, in my opinion. It covers a range of websites, including a number of consolidators. The fare results can be sorted by airline, by time, by price, by airports (it searches alternate airports automatically), and by stops. One of the biggest benefits is the ability to see the precise fare booking code, by clicking “details.” (This is great if you’re looking for a cheap but upgradable fare, for example.) A downside to Kayak is that they seem to exclude the big three online agencies — Travelocity, Expedia, and Orbitz don’t seem to come up in searches. On the plus side, JetBlue, who (like Southwest) doesn’t show up in the big three’s searches, comes up for comparison on Kayak. Negative is that they don’t seem to grab every possible routing from every airline (a common complaint for all aggregators). Kayak is 95% there, but not quite 100%.

SideStep
Sidestep is a very close runner-up to Kayak on the pure-airfare search. It covers a similar range of sites, plus includes Orbitz in the search. It has one interesting benefit: offering air and hotel package searches across multiple sites. Note that Sidestep is perhaps best known for its downloadable toolbar, which “watches” where you browse, and offers fare alternatives. I am not a fan of this over-the-shoulder co-browsing, but you don’t have to use their toolbar in order to run a search.

Farechase
Farechase, owned by Yahoo, copies much of Kayak’s template, but searches a slightly different universe of sites, including both Orbitz and Cheaptickets. The total number of sites searched is smaller, but doesn’t overlap entirely with Kayak or Sidestep. One downside: the flight details do not include the booking class/fare code. Presumably you need to go through the process of a complete booking in order to see that info.

Mobissimo
Like Farechase, Mobissimo DOES include some of the online agencies: Orbitz, CheapTickets, and Opodo, for example. However, it offers less flexibility in sorting the data than Farechase, and it doesn’t give much in the way of flight details. While the fares it finds are comparable to Farechase, the presentation is previous-generation.

Pricegrabber
Update: PriceGrabber has thrown in the towel, shutting down their travel search feature. The rest of their site is still up and running. This review stays up, though the travel service is defunct.
Pricegrabber is a comparison shopping site, and their travel search is just one among many. The search engine again follows the Kayak template, but it doesn’t tell you up front which sites it has searched. Results can be sorted by price, airline, time ranges, and, interestingly, ontime statistics. But you can’t see the flights’ booking class here either, the range of alternate airports is limited, and you don’t even know who the seller is until you choose the flight. They do work with Orbitz, and perhaps others, but they need to provide more information.

Bezurk
This is an Asia-based site that taps into a completely different pool of providers. It copies the Kayak model, again. However, because the search is based on Asian companies, it may be difficult to find a fare you can actually purchase if your travels don’t touch Asia. Nonetheless, for international travel, check it out.

Farecompare
This recently unveiled site is notable for its price-driven approach. Instead of entering cities/dates and comparing options thereafter, Farecompare asks for cities only, and drills down on the basis of price. Much like Travelocity’s Dream Maps or Search by Price, you may end up with a great price… on dates you can’t use. However, the site is interesting for the sheer volume of information it provides, and it offers historical data tracking the city pair’s fare trend over time.

What if you just care about price, without regard to anything else? Who has the best price? I did two searches, one for Chicago to Los Angeles, one for San Francisco to Sydney. The city pairs made no difference: In both cases, Kayak, SideStep, and Mobissimo found the identical lowest prices. Farechase’s “lowest price” was more than the others.

Aggregators are a great tool, but even then, you may want to run one or two of them, to see if they differ. Maybe we need an aggregator of aggregators (perhaps metakayak.com?) to truly get thorough searches.

In two weeks, I’ll test the aggregators’ searches for hotels, which offer an entirely different set of challenges. If there are any sites that you believe I have missed, or if you think my assessment is way off base, let me know by leaving a comment or using the contact link at the top right of the page.

Update (April 24, 2006): One reader wrote, reminding me of ITA Software’s excellent fare search tool. ITA powers Orbitz.com for airfare searches, though Orbitz’s search engine is a dumbed-down version with far fewer features. The genius of ITA is that it is incredibly powerful, if you know how to phrase your searches. However, it’s not a booking site, just an informative flight search, so even if you find a great fare, you have to find and book it elsewhere. Since ITA doesn’t actually get you to a booking (and, as the aggregators demonstrate, fares aren’t always available everywhere), I didn’t originally include them in the earlier discussion.

Update (April 28, 2006): Reader Todd points out that I forgot to include Qixo.com in my review. He’s right. Ahem:

Qixo.com
Qixo came up short. It offered less information (fare booking classes, provider, etc.) and had the highest price for identical searches. I ran fresh searches for new dates, with the same city pairs. Once again, Kayak had the lowest fare with the most choices and depth of information. Sidestep and Farechase had the same prices, with less info. Pricegrabber was a few dollars more expensive. Bezurk found nothing at all for North American itineraries. And Qixo? $120 more than the others. When the site even worked. Qixo came in last.

Bargain-hunters rejoice! Side by side comparisons of JetBlue fares with the competition are now possible.

A significant number of people are seemingly hard-wired to go straight to the websites of discount carriers JetBlue or Southwest, assuming that they’ll have the lowest prices. This isn’t always true, but many people think it’s true, and it takes some extra legwork (or at least extra pointing and clicking) to figure out which airline really is cheapest.

You won’t find Southwest or JetBlue fares on Orbitz, Travelocity, Expedia, or Opodo, so you can’t compare their fares. The reason: Southwest and JetBlue don’t participate in the GDS’s (Global Distribution Systems) — worldwide computer networks that share fare and reservation information with authorized users like travel agencies and the big online booking sites.

Southwest and JetBlue, much like Amazon.com and WalMart, have trained a large subset of consumers to shop them first, without comparing the competition. But online travel search aggegator Kayak.com,which runs parallel searches on multiple travel websites, recently added JetBlue to the search.

It’s not as useful as having JetBlue in the GDS’s, but it’s a big step toward greater transparency, which helps the consumer.