Web Worker Daily

Most people who travel for work or pleasure have patterns for using some of the array of web sites that allow you to plan trips and buy tickets or other services, such as reserving hotels or rental cars. As you might expect, each travel site promises to be better and faster than its competitors.

I have jumped around a lot over the years in the sites I check. But recently, the one I go to first is FareCompare.com. It has many similarities but also some key differences, vs. other multi-airline travel sites whose names are more familiar, including Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity.
FareCompare makes forecasts on the direction air fares are headed, so that anyone who can plan weeks or months in advance can have a better idea about the best time to buy tickets. The site also has a greater variety of information and recent news about air travel than others I’ve checked.

Another good site, farecast, also predicts whether fares are likely to rise or fall on multiple U.S. airline routes. In planning a trip to Europe next summer, I am using both farecompare and farecast and am finding prices within a few dollars of each other on the two sites.
On both farecompare and farecast and some other similar sites, including Kayak, Sidestep and Vayama, you don’t book travel services directly.
To actually buy a ticket, you’re sent to the airlines’ own sites or to ones like Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity that are online travel agencies authorized by airlines to issue their tickets.

FareCompare CEO Rick Seaney says he has developed predictive capabilities, using a massive database of airfares past, present and future, that others haven’t matched yet. For 2009, Seaney’s big-picture forecast: Expect domestic air fares to be higher than they were this year, and international fares to be a bit lower, or at least to not go up as much as domestic prices.

Another reason I tilt toward FareCompare is its direct link to Southwest Airlines’ web site. Southwest is not part of the traditional airline and travel agents’ “global distribution system,” and thus doesn’t have its flights listed in the other big multi-airline sites.

Anyone who has Southwest service available within 100 miles of home should be checking its simple, easy-to-use site along with the multi-airline sites. Southwest flies only domestically and doesn’t cover the whole country, but it serves almost all major metro areas and dozens of mid-sized cities. According to hitwise.com, Southwest.com consistently gets more traffic than any of the multi-airline sites.

How do you plan trips and make reservations on the web?