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File this under PR that works, because it makes me laugh… FareCompare has decided to send a semi-crotchety member of its staff to every state in the continental U.S., dressed in a Santa suit. It’s a simultaneous homage to Christmas, a testament to mileage-running, and a test of their site’s low-fare search capabilities.

The travels and travails of Grumpy Santa, who gets to spend all day in planes for close to two weeks, are being tracked at FareCompare’s Santa site. I hope he’s on the clock while he’s doing this. And that he gets to keep the miles.

I joked to FareCompare CEO (and blogger) Rick Seaney that Richard Nixon had tried this once before, when he campaigned for president in 1960. He just didn’t care about saving money on airfare at the time. (For the political junkies out there: Nixon promised to visit all fifty states when he accepted the Republican nomination. He lost to Kennedy, and pundits have argued ever since that Nixon spent time flying to out-of-the-way places, just to cross off a state from his 50-state strategy, rather than campaigning in tossup states where his presence might have made a difference.)

So in the spirit of the other season we’re in — presidential election season — I requested a photo of FareCompare’s Grumpy Santa giving the Nixon “victory” farewell from the top of the air stairs. Ask for photo, get video. How’s THAT for service!

(Reading this in a feed reader? Click here to view the original post with video.)

The other day, FareCompare.com CEO Rick Seaney sent over an analysis of AirTran’s recent fare sale. “When is a fare sale not really a fare sale?” The answer: When the airline hikes its fares, only to lower them with great fanfare a few days later. Hooray for the status quo?

Rick suggests that this is tantamount to those stores that once lined the streets of midtown Manhattan, declaring they were going out of business. That is, until you saw that the name of the store was “Going Out of Business, Inc.” or something like that.

So how did AirTran join such esteemed company as the all-things-must-go merchants of New York City? Within a one-month period, Air Tran raised their fares three times — twice for three days, once for five days — and then brought them back to the previous level. Each time, their return to normal pricing was heralded with breathless press releases and a marketing blitz, announcing a sale.

Rick is right: This is an at best questionable, at worst deceptive business practice. Think about it: If a department store jacked up its prices for a few days, then brought them back to normal, customers might be filing complaints with the Federal Trade Commission. Perhaps AirTran thinks that the fluctuating nature of air ticket prices makes them immune to such charges, but I think they’re walking on some very thin ice.

So now they’ve been called out on it. We’ll see if they’ll change their tune, of they’ll just keep right on doing it. If enough people catch on, the phrase “AirTran fare sale” might be like the boy crying wolf.

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This is the kind of experiment I wish I had thought of first: The guys at FareCompare decided to put various airline websites’ low-fare guarantees to the test. The results are mixed.

They did it by actually buying a ticket on every airline in their test. (They only included airlines that HAD a guarantee, naturally, so that meant American, Continental, Delta (sort of), Northwest, and United. US Airways, Southwest, AirTran, jetBlue, etc., weren’t included, since they don’t have a guarantee.)

Because FareCompare’s fare alerts — which I have strongly recommended in the past — give you several hours’ advance warning when a fare is about to drop, they knew exactly which tickets to buy. They bought the tickets before the fare drop went live. When the fare went down, they took a screenshot of a lower fare and filed for a refund and/or voucher with the airline.

What they found: Lots of variation. Each airline eventually came through, but the amount of effort required varied greatly. It wasn’t always easy: Some denied refund requests at first, or didn’t respond within 24 hours.

The airlines’ policies vary, too. Most required a $5 difference before considering a refund, but Continental required $10. Most give a cash refund, but United only gives vouchers. Most accept a lower fare published on any site, including their own, while American and Northwest bizarrely exclude lower fares that appear on their own sites. Delta doesn’t have a guarantee, per se, but they’ll refund your ticket within 24 hours.

It’s a great experiment. Go read the whole thing.

Note that FareCompare was testing the airlines’ sites only. Some online travel agencies have guarantees as well. For example, the folks at Peter Greenberg’s site recently had to step in to help a reader enforce Expedia’s guarantee.

In all these cases, it’s up to the customer to proactively search for a lower price within 24 hours. No one is going to volunteer the news that the price has dropped. But if you’re willing to spend the time and effort to check the prices again and wrestle with customer service, you could collect a few bucks.

The folks at FareCompare.com are an inventive bunch. I really like what they’re doing to lift the hood on the mechanics of airfares. I’ve previously posted about their fare alerts that tell you what the discounted fares will be hours before you can actually buy them, and how their fare search tools let you do flexible searches that the big booking sites have disabled.

So when FareCompare COO Neil Bainton started posting an index of airfares at his blog for airfare wonks, Airtravelchannel.com, I was interested.

What the index does is track the lowest fare (ignoring fare rules like minimum stay or advance purchase) between the 50 largest markets in the United States. That’s 1250 fares. (50 markets times 50 markets = 2500, but the fares are the same in each direction, so divide it by two to get 1250.)

Much like the Dow Jones Industrial Average doesn’t track all stocks, but only 30 blue chips, this index doesn’t cover all the bases. The index is a first cut at measuring the state of airfares as a whole. With tens of thousands of city pairs, and hundreds of fares between each airport, getting a glimpse of ALL the airfares in America isn’t going to happen anytime soon, and might not even be useful. (How many people really want to fly, say, from Grand Junction, Colorado to Pellston, Michigan? So I don’t think it’s not really necessary to include every fare.)

The index could have some interesting applications, especially for journalists or financial analysts who want to track the big-picture of fares in America. Just this past Tuesday, the index “crashed” 29 points, or 5.8%, with a Delta sale bringing the average down.

The index also comes with a one-to-four star label, to give the current reading historical context. Four stars obviously means that fares on the whole are generally good.

But the utility of this number isn’t immediate: No one buys “fares on the whole,” they buy specific tickets. This is all interesting stuff, and data hounds could eat this up. But individual travelers would probably benefit from a more localized index that targets their home airport. Neil tells me this is in the works.

An index just for your own city might be one extension. A rule-driven index might be another. Business travelers who can rarely take advantage of ultra-low advance purchase fares might instead benefit from an index of refundable fares, or 3-day advance purchase fares, possibly sorted by home airport as well.

Much like there is an industry-specific stock index for practically every sector of the economy, this could balloon into a huge number of indicators. Heck, this could be monetized by creating futures contracts based on an index like this. Go long the San Francisco fares and short the Dallas index! Don’t laugh, there are websites out there that already do this sort of thing, and Wall Street isn’t far behind.

In any case, it’ll be neat to see where this goes. Information like this increases the transparency of airfares and travel costs as a whole, which is good for consumers. Bring it on.

The good folks over at FareCompare want to know what you think will happen to Delta in the great merger game, so they’ve set up a poll. It’s not quite making book on the outcome, but they’re trying to see what the public thinks will happen.

(And no, the TradeSports/Intrade people haven’t set up a wager for airline mergers. Yet.)

Click here for the poll.

Reader Steven writes in:

I know that so called y-up fares can be a good way to sit in first class for cheap, but I can’t find them for flights to Europe or Asia. Can you help?

The reason you can’t find them, Steven, is because there are none by that name. International long-haul discount first (and business) class fares go by different names than their domestic equivalents.

Y-UP fares and their ilk are limited to North American flights, and generally refer to an upgrade from coach to first on two-class planes. See here for background on Y-UP fares, and see FareCompare’s Y-UP search tool to find these fares on routes you travel.

For Europe or Asia, you’re generally going to be looking for Z-fares. But there’s no handy-dandy search tool (yet) for Z-fares like there is for Y-UPs. (Neil and Rick, consider this a challenge!…)

Z-fares crop up from time to time, but aren’t available on every route. Traveling in summer or the December holiday season maximizes your chances of finding such a fare.

For international premium class travel, be sure to also consider the startup airlines like Maxjet, Silverjet, Eos Airlines, MiMa, and L’Avion. These offer all-business class flights to London, Milan, or Paris.

Related:
- First class for less than coach?
- More tips on finding discounted first class fares (Y-UP, Q-UP, etc.)
- Update/Correction re: discounted first class fares (Y-UP, Q-UP, etc.)
- Y-UP and Q-UP first class fares apparently not enough: Welcome M-UP and B-UP fares
- More trans-Atlantic flights, but lower prices?

I’m a fan of FareCompare’s fare drop alerting service, which I’ve mentioned before here. The alerts go out as soon as a lower fare is loaded into the system, sometimes several hours before it’s actually even available for purchase. That beats the pants off of Travelocity and Expedia alerts.

Until now, the problem was the volume of alerts. If you signed up for their e-mails, you’d get three messages a day, essentially one for every instance of new fares being published. If any flights, to anywhere in North America, dropped, you got an e-mail. That’s great if you’re completely flexible about your destinations, but really, how many people want to travel to Ketchikan, Alaska in November?

Now, finally, you can limit alerts to just those cities you want. Once you’ve signed up for alerts (see the box on the left side of their homepage), you can click “manage” and tinker with the settings. Big thumbs up on this improvement.

Reader AJ writes in. His question:

I would like to find an airfare search engine where I can put in an airport and see:

a) Where all the direct flights go and the prices for each.
b) specify “Europe” or “Asia” and see the best prices to countries in those regions.

Why you ask?
We frequently travel last minute, and frequently we do not care where we go, we just like to go. So if we have 5 days with nothing to do and want to go someplace, anyplace, in Europe it would be handy to see what the lowest price option is.

First off, I admire your flexibility, AJ. Way to go.

Your first criterion, finding only the nonstop flights from a particular departure point, is tough. Some search engines will let you specify nonstops only when you’re searching specific dates, but I can’t find a nonstop limitation on any of the broad, flexible searches I’m familiar with. (Other readers are invited to chime in with suggestions in comments!)

As for looking for the cheapest flight for ultra-flexible destinations, you’re in luck:
The two best options right now are offered by FareCompare and Mobissimo. Travelocity offers an option for domestic travel. ITA Software has a solution, too, but it requires more work and is not as flexible on dates. Here’s the breakdown:

- FareCompare offers a flexible destination search through their “Destination Deal Maps” in the middle of the page. Click on the continent you want, and a list of fares will appear. Clicking on a fare shows you the dates eligible for the fare. Pick a date, then an airline, and the system checks seat availability. FareCompare doesn’t sell tickets, so you’re directed to one of the major online agencies to close the deal.

- Airfare aggregator Mobissimo also offers a search like this, bizarrely located in the “activity search” tab. After selecting your departure point, you can select the desired continent from the pulldown. It’s odd to see “Europe” or “Africa/Middle East” listed as an “activity” right alongside “beaches,” “gambling,” or “opera houses.” But hey, the search works. Like FareCompare, Mobissimo doesn’t sell tickets, but directs you to the seller.

- Both FareCompare and Mobissimo effectively mirror Travelocity’s Dream Maps in format. But Travelocity recently neutered this tool for international travel searches. It still works well for domestic searches, and the site sells tickets directly. (The flexible international search was taken down because the fares didn’t include the fuel surcharges. See here for an explanation.)

- One final idea would be to use ITA Software’s search. ITA’s search requires you to input destinations, but it allows you to string a number of options together. For example, you could enter your departure city, then add a boatload of contending city names or codes to the destination field in the form. Say you’re interested in going to Europe, you could enter something like “ams;fra;par;lhr;dub;mad;cph;ath;rom” — a string of European cities’ airport codes, separated by semicolons. Then widen the destination search by using the pulldown menu to include any airport within 300 miles. Then click “more options” and uncheck “allow airport changes,” to make sure you arrive and depart the same city. That will pull in a LOT of destinations for the dates you want. ITA doesn’t sell tickets, and doesn’t point you to a seller — take your pick.

tags: travel | low fares | airfare search

Farecast, the site that intends to predict the directions of airfares for your specific travel dates, has expanded their beta site to include many more airports.

The horizon for predictions is limited to 3 months. If you’re looking at travel dates more than 3 months ahead, you won’t get any analysis, just fares.

It’s also still a bit buggy. I had a few searches come up with no flight results, or no prediction, even though they were in the range of “legal” dates.

Predicting airfares’ direction is tricky business, since fare wars are waged by humans, not machines. Plus, fuel prices depend on a number of geopolitical factors, which I suspect aren’t part of the Farecast algorithm.

I’m wary of predictions, but the fare trend is the key. (FareCompare offes a trendline, too.) If your fare is below that trendline, just buy. Don’t worry about the prediction. If it’s below the average, it’s a good fare.

Related:
- Farecast beta goes public, just in time for a reader review
- So how accurate is Farecast?
- The traveler’s crystal ball
- Market timing: More advice on when to buy cheap plane tickets
- The black art of repricing tickets

tags: travel | Farecast

A few nights ago, Rick Seaney, CEO of FareCompare.com, helped me bust the myth that Wednesday at midnight was the ideal time to buy plane tickets. Which led the Consumerist to throw down the gauntlet, demanding to know when the best time for ticket purchases actually IS.

Rick Seaney took their challenge. His answer, published in the Consumerist’s hallowed electronic halls, includes a detailed primer on the technical side of how airlines actually post their fares for others to see. Definitely worth reading.

Rick’s conclusion, though, is once again without a magic bullet. Shorter version: Get a feel for the historical price range for your desired itinerary and buy whenever it’s cheap. Use fare alerts to keep on top of price drops. Pull the trigger when the price is in the comfort zone. Don’t expect great deals more than 5 months before your flight date, or within two weeks of travel.

Rick astutely compares the price of airline tickets to the stock market. Like stocks, airfares run in a range, and they occasionally break to the downside — or the upside. If you’re really out to get the lowest airfare, you may need to take a stock trader’s perspective. (If anyone has figured out how to both buy low AND sell high in the air ticket market, let me know… Maybe the compulsive gamblers rational market economists at Tradesports.com, who seem to find a market/wager for any kind of world event, can figure out a way to make side bets on airfare…)

Added advice from me, for the truly hardcore: Even if you’ve bought the ticket, don’t stop tracking the fare. If your airline offers repricing or re-faring, stay on top of the fare trend and request a refund voucher if the price drops again. See my earlier post “The black art of repricing tickets.”

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tags: travel | low fares

Yesterday, the site Seeking Alpha posted this tip for getting the best price for airfares:

What’s the absolute best time to purchase a ticket directly from the airlines? Turns out it’s Wednesday from midnight to 1a.m. in the time zone of the airline’s “home base.”[…] Why? That’s when the computer systems of most airlines get rid of the reserved but unbooked lower fare reservations.

Several blogs — at least 36 of them as of this writing — picked up on this tip. The problem is it’s completely wrong. It’s pure, unadulterated bunk, a long-running myth of the airline industry.

I consulted with the good folks at FareCompare.com, who reaffirmed my view. The Wednesday midnight rule is a myth. Rick Seaney, CEO of FareCompare.com sets the record straight:

- Held reservations don’t all expire Wednesdays.

“Held inventory is released every day at midnight so Wednesday is nothing special. Agencies who use Sabre, Worldspan, Galileo and/or Amadeus [the major GDS’s — the global computer networks used for booking tickets] can hold DOMESTIC inventory (sold status SS) without ticketing up to 24 hours during the day, and the carriers at their choosing come in the evening at Midnight and release un-ticketed inventory. The hold for international inventory is normally longer than 24 hours but is at the discretion of the airlines. Some airline websites have a hold feature, but it acts the same way as an agency: the inventory is lost at midnight if not ticketed, and the itinerary is repriced at the current inventory for that flight at time of purchase. For the most part all airline sites use the same policy.”

- Most fares that are put on hold aren’t that cheap to begin with.

“It’s not the low fare inventory that opens up at midnight. Low fare inventory is almost always ticketed immediately. Un-ticketed inventory is normally high priced business inventory held by a corporate agency for business travelers who are on the fence about going, or by government workers who have a special ‘hold until travel’ feature for negotiated routes.”

- Midnight isn’t necessarily the best time for new fares, anyway.

“New fares (lower or higher) are distributed at 10:00am, 12:30pm, and 8pm EST and loaded about 2-6 hours later in the GDS and airline sites. Seat inventory is controlled by automated revenue management systems, which continuously monitor current sales and consult historical models to decide on whether to release the lowest price seat inventory. The 8pm domestic ATPCO [Airline Tariff Publishing Company – the clearinghouse (owned by the airlines) for raw air fare/rule distribution] fare feed (5pm weekends) is loaded into the GDS and airline sites between 12:15am and 1:30am, which has the changed fares. But there is no correlation to getting a good deal, just because some inventory might be freed up at midnight. It is just as likely to free up at 2pm when the yield management system decides sales are soft in a particular inventory price bucket for a particular flight.”

- SHOCKER: Some agencies will try to get a better price than the fare they sold you. You just may not find out.

“Large volume non-online agencies do have a practice of ticketing later at night and trying to re-price all un-ticketed items to see if any fares or inventory have changed on a particular flight (sometimes they pocket the difference, sometimes the customer gets the benefit).”

- This is not news.

“There is nothing special about this process. It has been this way for years.”

There you have it. Myth busted. It’s Wednesday night as I type, and though midnight is approaching, I’m not banking on any airfare deals tonight. Neither should you.

Big thanks to Rick Seaney for the insights.

UPDATE: SmarterTravel.com took on the same question today, and they suggest that Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday (especially Tuesday) are more likely to have lower fares. I don’t buy it. The explanation is purely anecdotal; I’ll go with the boys at FareCompare who track airfares obsessively, who say the low fares can come on any day.

Related:
- Low fare alerts: Machine vs. human
- Flexible-date search alternatives for international destinations

tags: travel | airfares | FareCompare

Reader David S. writes:

Have you heard of the site airfarewatchdog.com? They list some very good fares. However I sometimes have a difficult time finding the fares that they list. What do you think about the site?

Indeed, I’m certainly familiar with George Hobica’s Airfarewatchdog. He and his team scour the internet for low fares and post regular updates, both listing the best fares in America, and the best fares for individual departure cities. It’s a great overview. His site has pointed to some good stuff, and I’ve linked to him before — like the $750 round trip business class fare on Maxjet back in March. He offers e-mail subscriptions, too, though the mailings are sometimes erratic.

Meaning no disrespect against Airfarewatchdog, but I find FareCompare’s alerts to be faster and more consistent. E-mails go out as soon as lowered fares hit the databases. If that’s too much information, you can get a good snapshot of fares from your city with the site’s Destination Deal Maps (effectively the same as Travelocity’s recently downgraded Dream Maps — except it functions both domestically and internationally.)

To see the Deal Maps, go to FareCompare.com and enter your departure city in the middle of the page.

To join the fare alert list, go to FareCompare.com, click on the Deal Maps or run a search for city pair, and then click on the “FareCompare AirFare Email Early Warning System” box in the upper left corner.

The downside of FareCompare is that it doesn’t cover Southwest or JetBlue, since those airlines don’t participate in the big global fare networks (GDS’s). So a human touch is necessary to test those fares.

It’s a case of machine vs. man. FareCompare’s automated system offers faster response than the more human search of Airfarewatchdog. But the ‘dog includes airlines that the machines can’t.

tags: travel | Airfarewatchdog | FareCompare