This phenomenon of peak surcharges began last year. It’s getting worse, not better, as more airlines adopt these fees that aren’t technically part of the base fare.

While there’s more to airfares than just these surcharges, avoiding (or minimizing) these fees can make a holiday trip more affordable.

Here’s a snippet for the Thanksgiving dates:

Note that Thanksgiving Day, and days prior to the marked dates on the chart, are surcharge-free. Interestingly, AirTran, which added surcharges over the summer, is refraining now.

Click on the image to see the full post and December date info.

Downgraded: Southwest Airlines
Southwest keeps acting more and more like a “regular” airline. The company has changed its contract of carriage to brazenly and bizarrely refer to a mechanical delay as an act of God. Deus ex machina? I don’t think so. Lame, and begging for a legal challenge…

Strong: Downgraded: Wegolo
The Netherlands-based discount-airline fare aggregator Wegolo lost a court case to Ryanair, thereby preventing it from scraping Ryanair’s website to include their fares in search results. Ryanair’s beef? Wegolo charged a surtax on the Ryanair fare for booking via the search site.

Downgraded: Star Alliance
After several years of expansion (with the addition of Continental being the biggest deal, from a USA-centric perspective), Star Alliance is losing a member: Shanghai Airlines, which is merging with China Eastern Airlines, is leaving Star Alliance for SkyTeam in October. Within Star Alliance, Air China remains the lone Chinese member airline. Will another Chinese airline join the fray? Maybe the butt-kicking staff at Sichuan Airlines will convince management to get interested in joining the party?…

Upgraded: Hotel ratings
Every year, the J.D. Power survey results come out with some fanfare, rating customer satisfaction with major hotel chains. The top line news is usually the winner in each category. I like to go deeper, and if you’re interested, the full results are here. Somewhat of surprise for me: The more casual Aloft brand beat (but effectively tied) the more established Westin brand within the Starwood franchise.

Downgraded: Mexicana
Upgraded: Repo Men
It’s not looking good for Mexicana Airlines right now. The company has had three aircraft seized by creditors, they are canceling flights, and they are publicly admitting that they are “probably” looking to enter bankruptcy. Points for honesty! If you’ve got tickets already, it’s probably too late to buy travel insurance. If you haven’t bought tickets, it’s probably a bad idea to click “purchase” until you know for sure what’s happening.
UPDATED August 3, 2010: Mexicana has indeed filed for bankruptcy. The airline is cutting back flights, but is still operating.
UPDATED August 5, 2010: Mexicana has now stopped selling further tickets, but is still technically operating. Not exactly a confidence booster to shut down your sales operations, though. Mexicana Click and Mexicana Link, the lower-cost domestic airline subsidiaries, are still operating and selling tickets.

ITA writes the code that powers the search engine behind Orbitz, CheapTickets, Kayak, Bing Travel, and a list of airlines. They also manage their own fare search site. ITA’s search site exists in seemingly perpetual beta, but it’s incredibly useful for finding complex itineraries that don’t automatically pop up in the usual booking sites.

In and of itself, it’s news that Google is committing to the travel space. But how might this affect the way we buy airline tickets?

Google says they’re not about to compete with agencies or airlines themselves. Their press info for the buyout reads: “Google won’t be setting airfare prices and has no plans to sell airline tickets to consumers.” (Somewhere, someone is sighing relief. Someone else is sighing in disappointment.)

Offhand, I actually don’t think Orbitz and CheapTickets (both part of the same company…) are at immediate risk, just because Google now owns their key data supplier. Google says (for now) that they don’t want to enter the travel sales business, so they won’t want to hurt what has to be one of their biggest clients.

So whose business is at risk? Which sites are in trouble? To me, it looks like a bad day for Kayak.com, Bing Travel, and any other metasearch sites that use ITA.

The metasearch business model is predicated on organizing information. So is Google’s. And much of Kayak’s information is coming from ITA. Google could easily take the ITA software engine and create a Kayak-esque site. And while Kayak has gotten a lot of attention over the years, it’s nowhere near the scale of Google. Kayak is at risk.

Not quite at the same level of risk, given the umbrella they’re under, but still in a weird position: Bing. Because Microsoft’s Bing also uses ITA, Google would suddenly become a supplier to Microsoft. An odd couple.

In a couple years, Kayak and its ilk may be marginal players in a field dominated by Google.

And Kayak must have seen the risks that Google poses. After all, Kayak itself was itself reportedly a failed bidder for ITA, alongside Expedia and Travelport.

“Explore” set some business media hearts a-twitter (for example…) upon release, with stories of how innovative this site is, but I’m sorry, it’s not good enough. “Explore” is neither a new idea nor the best possible execution of that idea.

Travelocity had “Dream Maps” years ago, which mapped fares from a given city. You clicked on the fare on the map, and you got a detailed list of the fares, the airlines, the fare codes (!), and the rules/dates applicable. You could click on a fare and a calendar with eligible dates popped up. You could choose dates and search for availability on the spot. I miss this.

One major reason I miss Travelocity’s Dream Maps is because they listed all the publicly available fares that were loaded into Sabre. Sure, you had to click through a number of fares before finding something that met your dates, but they were bookable. That’s not what Kayak is providing. You’re not seeing all possible fares. Instead, Kayak’s “Explore” pulls fares from a much more limited pool. From the site itself (emphasis added):

Fares displayed are for round-trip economy class travel found by Kayak users in the last 48 hours. Fares include all taxes and fees but may not include baggage fees charged by carriers. Seats are limited and may not be available on all flights or days. Fares are subject to change and may not be available on all flights or dates.

A rolling 48 hour window of search results is problematic in a number of ways. Not only are fares rapidly outdated, and thus useless in a search, but by limiting your results only to those cities where someone else has found a fare in the past 48 hours, you’re only getting a small number of actual fares. You’re essentially relying on others doing the searches for you. And those fares are pulled for specific dates, not a range of dates. Not necessarily your dates.

The fact that the range of results — based on other people’s searches in the last two days — is likely to be limited is especially problematic if you’re searching from small airports. New York fares might be pretty reliable, but how about Walla Walla, Washington fares?

Other sites have taken a stab at this, too. FareCompare currently comes closest. But I’ve had trouble actually booking some of the fares that come up. Mobissimo lets you search by regional destinations, too. And again, some of those fares aren’t bookable.

Bottom line: I like the idea of Kayak Explore. It’s a great concept. But someone (else?) can and should make it better. I know it’s a moving target, and a big set of data to sift through, but it was done once. Let’s map the complete range of bookable fares — again — to truly empower the consumer.

Related:
- Flexible-date search alternatives for international destinations
- Reader mail: I don’t care where I go, it just has to be cheap

• Hertz made an offer to buy Dollar/Thrifty for $41/share. Avis subsequently signaled interest in making a higher bid. Bottom line: The car rental market is about to shrink.
• Google is reportedly in talks to buy ITA Software, which provides much of the functionality for sites like Orbitz, Kayak, TripAdvisor Flights, and others. You can’t just google a ticket today, but you may do so soon.

The battle for Dollar/Thrifty between Hertz and Avis is largely about consolidation and elimination of the competition (much like the “Continited” merger). At the same time, buying Dollar/Thrifty would give Hertz or Avis a larger presence in the comparatively “downmarket” leisure travel segment.

The speculated deal for ITA Software is perhaps more interesting. What will Google do if it gains the technology and software engineering human resources to run better fare searches? Will they offer a search-of-searches, pushing traffic to airlines and online travel agencies, but putting Kayak and their metasearch ilk out of business? Will Google challenge Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, et al. themselves and build a Google travel agency? Will Google continue to sell the powerful ITA engine (which ITA lets anyone test drive on their beta site — login as guest) or will they let contracts expire and keep the technology for itself? Plenty of theories, but no answers.

So in the past week, the competitive landscapes for flying, driving, and booking travel have all potentially changed, with minimal visible benefits to the consumer. After all, less competition breeds higher prices.

All we’re missing is a hotel deal and a cruise line merger, and we’ll be all set. (The week is young.)

In an age when online travel agencies are taking steps to improve price transparency by increasingly quoting the total price for airfare, rather than the deceptively-low price prior to taxes and fees, United Airlines is going the other way. This is particularly frustrating because their site used to quote fares more honestly.

Last week, United’s fare display shifted from quoting fares with all-in pricing to the new pre-tax/fee rates. At left, you’ll see a screenshot of a fare as it’s now quoted on the first results page. Yes, there’s a mention of additional fees and taxes to be added, but these used to be included in that box.

(One improvement in that display is the number of seats available at that price. This is something the major online travel agencies like Orbitz and Expedia have been offering for a while now, but it’s nice to see United offering it, too.)

Below, you’ll see what happens when you click through to the next page, and taxes are added in.

This change is raising the hackles of a number of United frequent fliers. Here’s an excerpt from a letter forwarded to me by reader Antonio:

Dear United,

I must say, I’m shocked at how bad the new online booking system is. It has all of the telltale signs of a “cheap discount” carrier, and I mean that in the worst possible way. To quote the price not including taxes and fees is misleading, and leaves a really bad impression on United once a user clicks on an itinerary and sees the price jump by a significant amount. And saying “Hurry, purchase today” at the top of a potential itinerary is just tacky.

If United wants to become Allegiant, then by all means continue down this path. But if United want to retain the status of being America’s premium flying option, then please retain an elegant website that treats the customers with respect and doesn’t try to pull a fast one in terms if pricing.

Though I would question the use of the term “retain” in referring to United in the same breath as “America’s premium flying option,” Antonio is absolutely right on other counts: United should treat customers with dignity and show the public the full price, like it did just one week earlier.

Related:
- Hotels will be forced to disclose fees and charges up front… but not to US customers
- Will airlines start unbundling fuel entirely from the fare?

The Expedia fee was scheduled to go back into effect on June 1. The company had two choices: Quietly reinstate the fees, and face the marketing wrath of the no-fee competition, or “permanently” kill the fee with a big fanfare. How’s the fanfare sound on your end?

The big agencies still get a cut of the sale, unlike most mom-and-pop travel agencies, so the extra booking fee monies were additional revenue. Many customers (31%, according to here) were doing their searches on the major agencies’ sites, and then going to the airline to book directly and save the fee. Now, the agencies’ fares should be on the same level as the airlines’ own websites.

Interestingly, Expedia also cut change fees in the same breath:

Other fee changes also were announced Wednesday. Expedia.com said it will eliminate the change-and-cancel fees on hotel, car rental and cruise reservations and on most flight reservations. Flights that are part of certain package deals will still be subject to a fee when reservations are changed or canceled. Expedia.com said it will resume charging $20 [on June 1, 2009] to make a flight booking over the phone, a fee that was halted during the promotion.

Eliminating change-and-cancel fees is nice, but it’s just the surcharge, not the totality of relevant fees. Airlines are charging $100, $150, or more to change itineraries for non-refundable booking classes, and Expedia can’t waive those fees. The elimination only applies to the surcharges which Expedia tacked on.

In any case, this puts pressure on Travelocity and Orbitz to make fee cuts permanent as well. Both of those sites’ fee-elimination policies have a sunset clause, and fees are scheduled to re-emerge on June 1. Neither site is commenting on whether they’ll follow Expedia’s lead or not. We’ll see if there are more announcements of newly-permanent fee reductions in the coming days…

Orbitz has followed suit and has temporarily ended the airfare booking fee, for tickets purchased through May 31, 2009. The fine print: “Valid for round-trip or one-way flights through May 31, 2009. Excludes multi-carrier itineraries and flights originating outside the U.S., Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.” Too bad about the multi-carrier itineraries. That’s something Orbitz excels at, so perhaps it makes sense that they still charge a premium for it. But still, too bad.

In their press release, they pitch that the combination of the newly-deleted fees and the Price Assurance program (analyzed here and here) makes them the online agency of choice. Assuming that the fares are the same at, say, Orbitz and Expedia, but the only difference was Orbitz’ Price Assurance program, then yes, I’d choose the no-fee Orbitz (even if I’m still a skeptic as to the real worth of Price Assurance).

But regardless: the clock is ticking. May 31 is the same expiration date as Travelocity and Expedia, which is not a huge window of opportunity.

But will they really bring fees back on June 1? I still maintain that, once you and your competitors let the genie out of the bottle, it’s hard to be the first to squeeze it back in. Priceline and Hotwire are unlikely to add the fee back in. Will Orbitz blink? Will Expedia? Travelocity?

I’m still betting that the no-fee environment will be extended. If one agency brings the fee back, expect a marketing blitz by competitors, touting the difference.

In the meantime, consumers benefit.

For starters, there are sites which have folded, some new competitors, and sites that changed their model significantly. At the same time, there has been pushback from airlines and suppliers, some of which have resisted the aggregator model. (The lawsuits between American Airlines and Kayak, which initially resulted in American Airlines no longer being listed in Kayak results, was perhaps the most prominent case of pushback. Since October 2008, aa.com results are back in the results. More on that below.)

The result: The golden ring of a truly complete search, covering all the options and all the providers, is still a ways away. No single site actually finds every flight option, every fare, or every seller.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t differences between the aggregators. It’s time to disaggregate the aggregators again.

This year, each site was put through multiple tests. Four kinds of itinerary were tested: A large-city to medium-city domestic US flight with multiple carriers offering direct service; a medium-city to small-city domestic US flight with at least one change of plane required; an international flight with a US origin; and international flights (from Paris to Dubai, and Manchester to Madrid) to test how sites do for non-US flights. For each of these flights, I tested a short-term booking (7 days advance purchase) and a longer-term booking (30 days advance purchase).

This time, I compared Kayak, Sidestep, Mobissimo, TripAdvisor Flights, Momondo, Skyscanner, WeGo (formerly Bezurk), Trax, Farecast, Fly.com, and Dohop. Sites which were on the list last time but either folded or stopped doing metasearch include FareChase (bought by Yahoo, then abandoned in March 2009), PriceGrabber, and Qixo.

So which aggregator came out on top in 2009? Here’s the summary, with site-by-site reviews thereafter…

• Overall best bet: TripAdvisor Flights. Low fares, good features, a solid performer overall. It took them a while to join the game, but it’s a strong product with a small but important edge over its closest competitor, Kayak.
• Lowest price, domestic: If you’re searching for domestic US airfare, most of the aggregators did pretty well, but the lowest fares were consistently on TripAdvisor Flights, Mobissimo, or Momondo (Kayak and Sidestep would have been included in this list, but they often offered the lowest flights at the same base fares, but typically directed you to Orbitz, instead of to the airline or to a no-fee site like Priceline, to buy the ticket. Orbitz still charges a booking fee as of this writing, so single-airline itineraries can typically be purchased for less elsewhere.)
• Lowest price, international from US: If you’re searching for international flights starting in the US, try Kayak and Trax.
• Lowest price, international, ex-US: If you’re search for international flights that don’t originate or end in the United States, Mobissimo and Momondo performed best.
• Class conscious: If you’re looking for a deal on premium cabin fares, fly.com is your site.
• Sorting features: If you want control over options, and like to tweak and limit your results, Kayak gives you the most power.
• Real total cost: TripAdvisor Flights lets you estimate what your actual costs will be, including luggage checking fees, headphone charges, etc.
• Avoid: WeGo, which offered impressively-low search results, but none were actually bookable. Also avoid Dohop, whose prices were consistently higher than their competitors.

Individual site reviews

TripAdvisor Flights
Although a clone of its competitors in many respects, TripAdvisor’s new aggregator offers one big difference: The site offers an analysis of how much the flight will actually cost you, once you figure in the baggage fees, the headphone fees, etc. It even considers what your elite status is. That’s a great feature. Second, and more disappointingly, the site (unsurprisingly) favors its sister sites Expedia and Hotwire in its results. But those sites add no booking fee right now, so no big whoop. The site combines the best sorting features of Kayak with the added value of fee analysis. TripAdvisor takes it by a nose.

Kayak
Kayak is the largest of the metasearch sites, and it offers solid results. But it didn’t consistently offer the cheapest fare, because the universe of sites it searches is sometimes limited by agreements with individual partners. (American Airlines, for example, won’t allow results from its website to be shown alongside AA flights sold through Orbitz.) Orbitz puts demands on its partners, too, and subsequently, Kayak is heavily Orbitz-centric, with no representation of Expedia, Travelocity, or Priceline. Actual fare availability was good when I clicked through to sellers’ sites. Kayak’s sorting features are still the best (so good that they’re copied wholesale by TripAdvisor), with the ability to narrow search results by time, airline, or aircraft type (e.g., no props or RJs), to name a few. The site has recently added “flight quality warnings,” such as on-time percentages and tight-connection alerts, but those aren’t a big deal.

Sidestep
Kayak bought Sidestep a few years ago, but continues to operate the site as a standalone entity. Frankly, I don’t see why. The results are identical, the search tools are nearly the same, and there’s nothing to recommend this site over its parent. Everything stated above is true here as well, but why bother?

Farecast
Farecast, now owned by Microsoft, is most famous for their fare prediction engine, which suggests whether ticket prices for your route will drop in the future. The predictions are pretty accurate, though they don’t account for times of day, routing, or airline, if you have preferences on those matters. (And you should.) Farecast also offers up an aggregator, albeit a fairly minimalist one with few options and a favoritism for Orbitz results. Come here for the fare predictions, but for live fare comparisons, you’re better off elsewhere.

Mobissimo
Mobissimo claims to search more sites than anyone else, but not necessarily for a domestic US search. They have good coverage of Asian and European airlines, but their controls and filters are less than others’. Decent results, but I preferred others’ display of information.

Fly.com
From the folks who brought you TravelZoo, Fly.com offers one gimmick that’s worth noticing: First- and business class fare comparison. That’s it. Otherwise, it’s a clone of other sites. If you’re not looking for premium cabin seats, skip it.

WeGo (formerly Bezurk)
Big on teasers, low on success. WeGo touts some amazing fares, but good luck buying them. They also don’t list the lowest flight first: They show a sponsored link at the top. Bad, bad, bad.
Update April 9, 2009: WeGo has eliminated the sponsored results feature.

Skyscanner
Britain’s SkyScanner offers decent results for UK-based searches, but it’s not as helpful to others. For US and non-UK searches, SkyScanner searches returned far higher fares than the average.

Momondo
This Danish site is quite good at ferreting out obscure sellers of travel, especially for intra-European itineraries. But be aware that you’ll often get results from suppliers in countries outside the destination or origin. Flying Chicago to Baltimore? Your ticket could be sold by a British company (which could mean a 3% credit card surcharge).

Trax
Update December 2009: Trax has retrenched, and is no longer touting their fare comparison as their primary product. Their homepage shows a disclaimer as of December 7, 2009. But their search engine is still up and running if you dig for it… This is odd, to say the least.
Trax.com offers a Kayak-lite search that works well for domestic US itineraries. They include Priceline and Cheapoair, which others don’t, but the results weren’t significantly better.

Two other sites of note:
1. An aggregator you can’t use for booking, but which is great for research, remains ITA Software. Their engine powers Orbitz, and backs up Kayak and TripAdvisor results. They’re a great resource. (Click “log in as a guest” to use the search without registering.)

2. No discussion of fare search would be complete without a mention of FareCompare. The site’s alerts give you a heads-up on future sales by notifying you when fares drop, before they go on sale. They offer fare search, too, which is powered by Kayak.

So… what’s your experience with fare aggregators? Hit the comments to share your stories.

Here’s what I wrote when it was rolled out:

Unlike Yapta, which tracks fare drops and alerts you when the published price goes down, Orbitz will automatically send you a check IF AND ONLY IF another Orbitz customer purchases the same ticket you booked, and they do it for less money. If the price just goes down, but no one buys that ticket on Orbitz, you’re out of luck. No refund.

So when would you be more likely to win in the refund lottery? It would need to be a frequently purchased itinerary, so I’d be expecting it on major business routes like Washington-Chicago, San Francisco-New York, etc. Trying to get a price drop refund on that Bozeman, Montana to Fayetteville, North Carolina itinerary? Good luck with that.

So were my hunches right, or wrong? I asked Orbitz what the numbers really look like. Here’s an update from their reps:

Orbitz has mailed refund checks to travelers on over 2,400 routes since June 2008. This information is based on flights purchased on Orbitz.com in instances where a customer has purchased an airline ticket, and a subsequent Orbitz customer purchases a ticket on the same flight at a lower price, automatically generating a refund.

Subsequently, Orbitz provided a spreadsheet with the top ten refunded routes from ten cities. (The document was labeled “top 20,” but there are 70 routes mentioned.)

As I predicted, the majority of routes are indeed major business routes between American cities. There are some quirky outliers, though. Atlanta to Liberia, Costa Rica; Chicago to Guadalajara, Mexico; Miami to Barranquilla, Colombia; New York to Paris. The major business routes remain king, though.

Have any of you bought a ticket on Orbitz and gotten a refund afterward? If so, hit the comments.

[UPDATE: In a followup, Orbitz has provided the top 20 routes that have generated refunds. The list of 70 routes originally posted represents the top ten refund routes for those particular departure cities. I'm appending the top 20 list as well. Thanks to Orbitz for sharing the data!]

See the complete list, as provided by Orbitz, below the jump…