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.

Similar price, enormous difference in distance. Charlotte to Greensboro is 83 miles. Charlotte to Spokane is 2060 miles. A nearly 25-fold difference. Let’s look at that on the map, courtesy of the Great Circle Mapper, for laughs:

Yes, yes, yes, airlines price tickets on more than just distance flown, such as the supply and demand for a city pair. And that often means less-served airports are often more expensive. I get that. There’s an economic logic behind fluctuating fares that isn’t immediately transparent.

But pricing a cross-country flight and a local, instate trip up interstate 85 the same? That’s not helping the airlines’ PR.

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.

Most every fee the airlines have imagined (so far) is there. The phone booking fee. The luggage fee. The cost of snacks, booze, and meals. The pet fee. The skycap fee. The re-ticketing fee. And on and on. (The fee fee, the Arial font fee, and the fee fi fo fum fee, as outlined here, somehow didn’t make the cut.)

It’s a great list, insofar as it helps consumers make better decisions. I’ve always argued that the lowest fare may not be the best value. (And that doesn’t even take frequency, upgrade possibilities, on-time arrivals, or anything like that into account.)

Be sure to check out the list.

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.

(image)

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.

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

Click here for the poll.

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 (update: L’Avion is now renamed OpenSkies). 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?