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To see how the travel business really works, sometimes it takes a good old-fashioned lawsuit. Vanguard Car Rental, the parent company of Alamo and National, took Orbitz to court, because Orbitz wasn’t listing the Vanguard brands on the first page of search results when customers ran searches on the online travel megasite.

The suit, filed Friday in the Illinois Circuit Court of Cook County, alleges Alamo and National rental offers show up on a secondary page because Vanguard refused to increase the commission rate paid Orbitz for online bookings. That rate was established in a contract that runs through 2008.
[…]
Chicago-based Orbitz called the claims “baseless” in a news release, and said Vanguard was trying to sue its way to preferential placement on the website.

In addition to requesting the higher commission rate, Orbitz demanded $1.5 million in mid-April, Vanguard claimed.

Baseless? Orbitz panned the suit in a press release, but in the process, effectively admitted to doing what Vanguard accused them of, and exposed the nature of their business model: pay to play.

The bottom line is that Vanguard is trying to use a lawsuit to get a sorting result from Orbitz that Vanguard and Orbitz did not agree to. In short, Vanguard is trying to use its lawsuit to get something for nothing.

So the sorting of rental car prices isn’t based on price. Other sites are up front about this, by labeling the first set of results as “preferred vendors” or such. But Orbitz doesn’t do that. They just show results. And those results are driven by — let’s be blunt here — bribes.

So why did the judge throw out the case? After all Orbitz essentially agreed with Vanguard and admitted that they rank results according to who’s willing to pay for the privilege. But all this is seemingly legit, according to the contracts between the agency and the supplier.

At the end of the day, this illustrates that you really need to shop around. Never, EVER use just one site to search for fares or rates. You never know what secret deals are influencing the search results.

(Thanks to Budget Travel’s Sean O’Neill!)

Today, online booking megasite Orbitz.com rolled out a new feature that can best be described as really, really neat:
Passengers can log in and alert other travelers to the precise location of the longest or shortest lines, the time it takes to get through TSA screening, the degree to which the roads to the terminal are clogged with traffic, or anything else that’s useful to know about the airport that day.

The free feature just launched in beta today, but once it’s fully operational, with multiple reports from the field, it could be a great resource for travelers looking to move through airports more efficiently.

OrbitzTLC Traveler Update, as it’s being called, also pulls in more traditional flight status, traffic, and airport security information, which in itself is a nice feature. But it’s the public input (call it Web 2.0 if you absolutely must) that really makes this a great idea — one that I wish I had thought of myself. The service is accessible on mobile devices as well as via the Orbitz website.

With multiple voices posting updates, there’s sometimes contradictory information. Take these comments left by travelers in the Charlotte-Douglas Airport section. These were left within minutes of each other:

Avoid security checkpoint lines at Checkpoints B & C. The lines are shorter at A & D.

vs.

Skip the C Concourse security line. You can “fly” through the B check point!

At least they agree that you want to avoid C. The speed of B is up for debate.

Related:
- Orbitz.com (aff)

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Reader Julie writes:

I’m looking to buy tickets from Newark to San Francisco for the holidays, and Expedia has the lowest price for tickets on United. (Even lower than united.com) Can I upgrade these tickets if I buy them from Expedia? Thanks!

You’re in luck! For travel within the United States, most every airline allows upgrades if the tickets were purchased from online agencies like Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz, CheapTickets, etc. As long as the booking class is legally upgradable, it doesn’t matter where you buy it.

(The exception: If you bought “opaque” tickets from Hotwire or Priceline, i.e., you didn’t select the airline and/or flight times when you made your purchase, then you can’t upgrade.)

For international tickets, upgrades are generally a little more complicated. Not all booking classes are upgradable, either with miles or certificates. But again, as long as the ticket you buy conforms to the upgrade rules of the airline, then it shouldn’t matter where you buy the ticket. As long as you are buying a “published” fare, you should be fine. (And even then: I’ve upgraded a ticket purchased from a consolidator. But it’s up to each airline to set such rules.)

Buy the ticket from Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, or wherever it’s cheapest. And good luck getting the upgrade!

P.S. In theory, you could buy the ticket from United and invoke their low fare guarantee by pointing to the lower fare on Expedia to get $50 in credit, but it’s probably not worth the trouble…
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Last week, I mentioned that Orbitz had removed the flexible search option from its website. It turns out that the search function has been hidden from the main pages, but it’s still on the sitemap, and you can reach it (for now) via this deep link. It’s one of the better search tools out there, so it’s good to have it back.

(Thanks to reader Tom!)

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

Yesterday, the good folks at the Consumerist posted a helpful list of tips on actually cashing in your frequent flyer miles. (Yours truly was consulted and quoted.)

A few extra bonus-round suggestions, caveats, and clarifications for people looking to maximize their odds of using their miles:

1) Use miles for expensive tickets
Don’t waste your miles on tickets you can buy for dirt cheap. Check the cash fare first. Flying from Boston to LaGuardia? Chicago to Philadelphia? Cash should be fine. Flying from Charlotte to Perth, Australia? Salt Lake City to Ushuaia, Argentina? Now you’re talkin’. Use your miles for something really worthwhile, that you might not spend the money on otherwise. International filghts, ideally in business or first class, for example. If you can’t swing that, then still try to get the most value out of the miles. See Miles or Buy for a tutorial on maxing out your mileage value.

2) Another upside to the phone: Holding seats
The airlines’ award ticket web pages let you book seats, sure, but they generally don’t let you put them on hold. If you call, you can have the seats held for you while you look into hotels, etc., so you can tinker with your plans a little. The hold usually lasts 72 hours.

3) Persistence pays off: Keep calling
While the 331st day and four week rules of award ticket availability are excellent guideposts, seat availability is dynamic, and you never know when seats might open up. If they don’t have seats when you call on Monday, they may have them on Thursday — say, a person who cancelled seats, or whose hold expired. Call back every few days.

4) Downside of the 331 day rule
Let’s say you call 11 months before your desired departure day, and you snag seats for the outbound. Unless you’re coming back the same day, your return ticket won’t be available for booking yet. Again, this is where the hold function is useful.

5) Downside of the four-week rule
Last-minute seats can pop up, but much like #4, you might find outbound flights but no returns, because the return isn’t last-minute enough. Plus, some airlines (notably American, though United is joining them soon) charge last-minute redemption fees, which are a pure, unadulterated way to screw the consumer.

6) Not all airlines suck equally
Some airlines (cough, Continental, cough) are notorious for making it hard to redeem your miles. Others are better (American generally gets good marks). So if you have a hard time cashing in miles on one airline, you might want to rethink your loyalty, if you have any.

7) Not all airline websites suck equally
Some airline websites will tell you that your desired date is sold out, but they’ll show you availability within a couple days. Continental and United come to mind. Others, such as Air Canada, include some (if not all) partner airline options online, but this is still not as reliable as picking up the phone.

8 ) ITA: Best engine for timetable searches
If you want to know who’s flying where, it’s hard to beat ITA Software’s beta public website. (Click “login as guest.”) ITA most famously powers Orbitz, but Orbitz strips out a lot of the cool functions. Once you’ve run the search, you can build an itinerary segment-by-segment (click “choose flights” at the top of the results page).

And good luck…

tags: travel | frequent flyer miles