Online travel deal finders were supposed to help you find the best, as in cheapest, deals. Naturally, what happens is that you end up a large number of travel search engines with a searchable database of travel deals, which means that you also need to go through all the travel websites to find the best travel deal. Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz and Hotels.com were already there, and now we have Yahoo crashing the party with FareChase (http://farechase.yahoo.com).

Let’s see what the geeks have to say about this. John Brandon, writing for Wired.com, found that unlike the first generation of travel sites, these startups don’t actually sell you the ticket once you’ve found your fare. Instead, they search airline and travel-booking sites to find the best deal, then hand you off to the site offering that fare when you’re ready to buy. We found that all four of the search engines we tested cover roughly the same travel websites, but the deals they found varied by as much as $100. On fare prices, Yahoo FareChase was the clear winner, delivering the lowest prices on five out of eight test routes.

Yen Lee, a former general manager of Yahoo Travel and current CEO of a travel startup,  points out on his blog that the real competition here is between Kayak/Sidestep and Yahoo/Farechase, with major financial implications for price search providers in general and both aforementioned companies in particular, depending upon who ultimately is able to provide the better deals.  It seems like just yesterday that the travel sector crowned Kayak the undisputed heavyweight champion of price comparison search following their acquisition of SideStep…On the other hand, Yahoo plunging into this price search is good validation to Wall Street that price search is still important.

What can we say? May the best travel deal win.

Posted on January 11th, 2008 by PLing
Filed under: Travel News, Travel Tips